Say Anything Blog

Apparently, to the Pulitzer Prize folks, sensationalism matters more than facts do.

Last week, New York Times reporter David Barstow received a Pulitzer Prize for his April 20, 2008 front-page investigative story, “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.” The article, which claimed that the Pentagon was engaged in propaganda by using retired military officers to promote Bush administration policies, has since been largely debunked by an independent, non-partisan investigation by the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Inspector General (IG).

The Barstow story was directed at the Pentagon’s program under which retired military officers were afforded access to senior leaders and briefings in which factual information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was presented.

But the Times’ reported that far from being objective, the Retired Military Analysts (RMAs) were pawns in a Pentagon propaganda program: “Hidden behind the appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.”

As a result of the Times story and Congressional inquiries it stirred up, the DoD IG looked into the RMA program and reported formally (PDF) that no laws or regulations were broken.

Don’t expect the Times to cover the DoD’s findings in this matter.  The damage is done.  Bush is out of office.  Prizes have been awarded.  No need to let facts get in the way now.

Retired military officials are regularly featured in the media as experts on foreign policy and military affairs in general.  This is nothing unusual, and certainly these retired officials have every right to make use of their expertise in the private sector and voice their opinions as free speech.  This is, after all, a free country.  Even for former members of the military voicing opinions about foreign policy liberal reporters don’t like.

And let’s not pretend as though there haven’t been plenty of military officials who have criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s handling of it.  I seem to remember plenty of former military officials getting no small amount of media attention because of their criticism of the Bush administration.  I wonder, did the New York Times ever investigate why those officials were appearing on television?

I think not.  Our liberal media only gets curious when someone says something to challenge their ideological viewpoint.  The testimony of those who reinforce it are believed without question.

At the end of the day, the only way there could even be a problem with something like this is if the retired military officials were being forced to express something other than their honest opinions.  Without evidence of that, we simply have the Pentagon responding to critics by putting people who actually know what they’re talking about on the air to respond to the criticism.

What’ so wrong with that?