Friday, April 25, 2008

Pay Scales

Still waiting for NPR to address its participation in the Pentagon's apparently illegal planting of "independent" military analysts on of news outlets to spin war coverage? I haven't heard "boo" on NPR news, but "Talk of the Nation" took it on this past Wednesday. Neal Conan had on Ken Silverstein of Harpers and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard (a reasonable person would ask, "Why?"). The "meat" of the report was the presence of Brian Duffy, Managing Editor of NPR news.

If you don't already know, NPR hired (and still frequently uses) Major General (Ret.) Robert Scales for "analysis." Turns out that not only is Scales a war profiteer (the company he founded states "In summary, we are new, lean, well-connected and able to meet the needs of any client or individual who wants to work with or better understand our fighting men and women in the land Services.") but he was also an eager participant in the Pentagon's propaganda program. As the New York Times article noted Scales wrote to the Pentagon, "Recall the stuff I did after my last visit; I will do the same this time."

So how did NPR confront this? It mounted an internal review! Duffy states, "We have found in a review since the Times article appeared that there was nothing that the general said to our listeners that was obviously related to or influenced by his outside interests or his participation in this program....in this case we were fortunate in that the general conducted himself with great propriety and provided useful analysis to our listeners....as I said in a review of our relationship with the general we saw nothing to indicate that his remarks to our listeners were unduly influenced by his participation in this program or by any other of his relationships...."

So all of Scales positive cheerleading of the US war machine in action had nothing to do with his "well connected" company that makes a killing off those connections. And how do we know this? Because NPR's own review of its participation in this sham said so.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Has anyone seen the Franco-German film "Night and Fog," or "Nuit et brouillard?"

It is one of history's greatest "shorts" about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps and what the allies did to the "office personnel."

They took these bureaucrats out of their cozy little offices and made them contemplate/look at what had been done on their watch: you see these German matrons carrying the dead and throwing them in a common grave--horrified.

Well, when democracy returns to the US, and it regains a Congress with cojones, one of its first acts might be to march into NPR and force all those little glib sonsofbitches out of their offices and out onto the United States to see how people are scraping by and surviving.

I'd pay to see Inscreep, Norris, Liarson, Montagne and all those assholes being forced to report on the real America--the one they daren't step inside.

I'd love to see that fat fuck Daniel Schorr having to report from Detroit and Milwaukee, how the unemployment rate there among black males is like Dresden 1945--like 90%.

I'd pay to see that! Little Missy Block among some real folks in the 9th ward.

That'd be cool. I'd pay to see that.

Miranda said...

I heard this show, and it was appalling. Goldfarb kept saying there was "no smoking gun" in the story, and that the only issue was that the generals supported the strategies of Rumsfeld, as if that were the only thing wrong with the Iraq invasion. Nowhere was the main point of Pentagon/Administration war propaganda or the absence of antiwar voices on NPR or in any of the mainstream media. The low point was indeed the "interview" of NPR's own man.

Thank God for Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!, which did an excellent segment on the issue.

Anonymous said...

It's called "damage control." And a pretty thin, glib, typical yuppie-scum NoPR attempt to do so.

And I hear ya can lure Missy-poo almost anywhere, with the promise of milk and cookies. And Rootypoop McCheekhole is a fatter f*ck than Schorr, if I may assert such an opinion here .

Ciao!

Anonymous said...

CIA and Pentagon take turns sabotaging each other's plans with stories like this.

Flash back:
CIA-whistleblower Ralph McGehee is about to publish his CIA-censored book, 'Deadly Deceits,' in 1983.
In it he details how CIA suppressed analysts like him who knew Vietnam was unwinnable. McGehee reminded us of the CIA analyst named Sam Adams who outed this scam in a 1975 edition of Harpers Magazine.

SO... CIA-CBS runs a pre-emptive TV special on how THE PENTAGON suppressed information before McGehee's book comes out.

This led to the famous General Westmoreland vs. CBS lawsuit and settlement.

So the strategy of CIA-NYTimes sandbagging Pentagon shills right now is to reduce their ability to propel upcoming pro-war budget psy-ops into military action against Iran in a lame-duck last ditch effort by Neocon-allied generals.

There is a method to this madness and few good guys.
Just fallings out among thieves.