Title
Media:AFP:Pentgn sspnds milt anlysts prgrm
Link
Pentagon Suspends Military Media Analysts Program - Media on The Huffington Post
-----------------------------------------------------
Excerpt
Pentagon Suspends Military Media Analysts Program
AFP April 28, 2008
AFP reports:
The Pentagon has suspended a public affairs program that has come under fire for using retired military "media analysts" as surrogates to get out its messages on the Iraq war, a spokesman confirmed Monday.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the program was undergoing an internal review following criticism that the retired officers offered Pentagon talking points as their own during the run-up to the Iraq invasion and thereafter.
The program, which was first reported in the Sunday New York Times on April 20, came under intense scrutiny from journalists. Ari Melber has a roundup of some of the criticism.
But as HuffPost's Jason Linkins notes, the Times has done little to advance its blockbuster story since it was first reported (unlike the Washington Post's aggressive series of follow-up stories on the Walter Reed scandal):
There has been a single editorial comment, inexplicably published on Saturday, six days after the story broke. On the same day, David Barstow followed up by reporting on the Pentagon's decision to suspend "its briefings for retired military officers who often appear as military analysts on television and radio programs."
Buried in Barstow's follow-up, however, was an admission: the Grey Lady had been scooped on the story by Stars and Stripes a day earlier. Additionally, the New York Times seems completely unaware that two days after they published their story, Fox News aired quotes from one of the individuals named in their original article, retired Major General Robert H. Scales. It is impossible to know every single possible avenue for follow-up, but surely we can agree that when one of the named networks brazenly deploys one of the named "message force multipliers" in its coverage, it's worth a mention.
------------------------------------------------------
Comment:
It's about time!
It's a shame to the military and the nation.