Bob Smith said:
Pentagon Launches Propaganda "News" Service
U.S. government officials and the Pentagon have long complained that
U.S. media coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is biased and
unbalanced.
So they've decided to fix the problem -- by launching the Pentagon's
own news service, to bypass the civilian media (also known as "the
free press") entirely.
The American public "currently gets a pretty slanted picture," Army
Capt. Randall Baucom, a spokesman for the Kuwait-based U.S.-led
Coalition Land Forces Command, told Associated Press (presumably one
of those biased U.S. news services). "We want them to get an
opportunity to see the facts as they exist, instead of getting
information from people who aren't on the scene."
So starting in April, the Pentagon plans to send military video,
photos and text from war sites directly to the Internet and to news
outlets.
At $6.3 million, the project, called Digital Video and Imagery
Distribution System (DVIDS) is one of the largest military "public
affairs" (i.e., propaganda) projects of recent years.
U.S. officials charge that the non-government media focus unduly on
catastrophic events like car bombs and soldiers' deaths, while not
paying sufficient attention to the military's efforts to rebuild the
countries it bombed and invaded. DVIDS is intended to "balance" that.
DVIDS will also let the Pentagon provide hand-picked photos, footage
and stories to the media concerning events from which the military has
barred the civilian media from covering -- thus giving the government
virtually total control over coverage of such events.
"We have an unfair advantage," Baucom said. "We're going to be able to
get closer to the incident and provide better spokespeople to give the
right information. The important thing is that we provide the public
with accurate information."
Critics, however, note that the Pentagon is not renowned for providing
"accurate information" about controversial military events. Many view
this as simply the latest move in an increasing effort by the military
to censor and control civilian press coverage.
"The Army wants to get their view across and they are using a
technique as old as any public relations maneuver ever devised," Aly
Colon of the Poynter Institute, a journalism research and education
center, told Associated Press.
"I would view the Army's decision, in the same way that I would view
OPEC creating a communications system to help the American public
understand what it means when prices go up," Colon said.
"This is the kind of news that people get in countries where the
government controls the media. Why would anybody here want to buy into
it?" Mac McKerral, president of the Society of Professional
Journalists, told Associated Press.
DVIDS will put a lot of their effort into providing locally focused
stories to small and medium-sized newspapers and TV stations in the
U.S. The local angle -- and the zero cost -- are intended to make the
stories attractive to such media, and the result is expected to be a
vast increase in positive coverage of war-related matters -- a major
propaganda coup.
"There are numerous good news stories that aren't told that do provide
a better balance on the overall successes we achieved in Iraq," he
said. "We'll be able to provide the option for those types of stories.
They're not going to lead in a major daily newspaper, but they'll play
well in smaller daily papers and especially weekly papers."
(Source: Associated Press
http://www.wtnh.com/Global/story.asp?S=1675781 )
**** this is why I say I dont believe what the Bush administration says****
. as for your post jarz, i am glad the pentagon is going to show some positive happenings over there. Of course they will hand pick what they show but at least it will be pretty credible that some positive changes are occuring.
