It's insane to me that we're all just supposed to give a US army program literally titled PSYOPS the benefit of the doubt because their corporate partners said there was nothing to worry about. Does anyone remember that the entire mainstream media was in full support of everything the bush administration did in the middle east, NPR included?
I remember. I don't think it was because of some unpaid interns in the mail room or whatever.
I think this kind of cloak-and-dagger conspiracy theorizing trivializes the real, challenging, human issues of editorial independence, the complexity of fairly representing reality, etc, etc.
We must have very different trust levels in the military industrial complex then. I think it's worth pointing out this program happened in 2000. Do you think it just went away? Do you think that when obama legalized spreading propaganda in the US no one capitalized on it?
I agree that the issues you listed are indeed real and challenging, but I also think that the media's heavy reliance on the "intelligence community" making claims as evidence when there is none is a more pressing one.
> I agree that the issues you listed are indeed real and challenging, but I also think that the media's heavy reliance on the "intelligence community" making claims as evidence when there is none is a more pressing one.
I totally agree that an over-emphasis on "access" leads to inaccurate reporting. You're certainly right to tie that to the invasion of Iraq.
But I don't think there's any evidence that the US military is running domestic psyops, and certainly if they were doing so it would not be via unpaid internships.
Of course there are broader problems. A lack of trust in the media and a lack of attention span--no doubt driven by social media intermediation and a lack of accountability for individual publishers--reduces incentives to get stories correct, and increases incentives to get stories. A public that misunderstands the role of reporters thinks analysis equals bias and is obsessed with up-to-the-minute stories, and high production values--the latter of which can only be afforded in large metro and national markets, leading to a hollowing out of local content.
These aren't original observations, of course. But they are indeed real problems. I think they have very little to do with the prospect of Pentagon psyops, which, frankly, are unnecessary given the underlying structural flaws.
Several years after Nixon's resignation,[0] Carl Bernstein published a piece in Rolling Stone alleging that over the course of 25 years, the CIA had tasked more than 400 journalists for special assignments, including Pulizer Prize winnders and a publisher for the New York Times.
"Some of these..relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services-from simple intelligence gather to serving as go-betweens."
