from military mouthpiece to Al Jazeera correspondant

This guy's got his propaganda bases covered! j/k -- the point is that Al Jazeera may be more of a traditional and legitimate news organization than the current state of the US media.

Another big point is how enmeshed the US military has gotten with Hollywood and the media. They had a $200,000 set for the generals to give briefings from.

As with many other things, the Bush administration broke with tradition and made the military a branch of civilian propaganda. This had not been done before, and had consequences:

[A]s a military spokesperson, you don’t talk about policy. You talk about the way you’re going to conduct an action, not why you’re going to conduct an action. So if someone were to ask me before the war, “Why are you going to invade Iraq?” -- and reporters did -- the only honest answer I could give is, “We’ll invade Iraq if the President orders us to. And we won’t if he doesn’t. We don’t get to pick and choose our battles.” That way, it’s left to a politician in a suit behind a podium at the White House to explain why they made that decision.

But instead, what we did, we had a Republican operative who was put in charge of our office, displacing a colonel that had started doing media liaison when this Republican operative was about probably five years old. And what this guy knew how to do was run a campaign, and so we were run like a political campaign. And the first step in that political campaign was to sell the product, and that was sell the invasion. So they gave the reasons down to the young troops, guys like me, to go out to reporters and give the reasons we’re going to invade a sovereign nation.

Here’s the problem: the reporters in no way had the latitude to ask someone in uniform a critical question. I mean, on MSNBC their coverage was actually packaged with a banner that said, “Our hearts are with you.” So when I’m the young troop in uniform on screen, and the viewer sees “Our hearts are with you,” do you think the reporter’s going to ask me a critical question? Of course not. But I’m out there giving political answers. I’m out there saying, “We’re going to invade Iraq” -- and this was the real catch: they would ask me before I would go on air live, “Are there any messages you want to get across today?” Well, yeah. My boss comes straight from the White House, and they have the messages of the day, and so they would give it to us. So I’d say, “Sure. WMD, regime change, ties with terrorism.” And they go, “OK. Well, I’ll ask you these questions, so we can get those answers out.” And they set it all up.

So it was part and parcel of selling the war to the public, using a media it knew would be deferential to uniformed troops. Use the troops as your salesmen, and the media will bend over backwards to be nice to them, even if it means uncritically reporting administration propaganda. As brilliant as it is antidemocratic and evil. And sad.