Pentagon caught lying about profiling journalists

The official newspaper for the Armed Forces has caught Pentagon officials spreading disinformation regarding reports on how they have allowed a private contractor to rate and profile embedded journalists.

As Raw Story reported on Monday, a public relations firm that organized the opposition to Saddam Hussein during the 1990s and “coerced” journalists during the run-up to the Iraq war is now vetting at least some embedded journalists in war zones to keep out those who have a history of writing negative stories about the US military.

“Any reporter seeking to embed with US forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress,” the military newspaper Stars & Stripes reported Monday.

The military journal partly funded by the Pentagon but editorially independent, is now reporting in a follow-up story, “Contrary to the insistence of Pentagon officials this week that they are not rating the work of reporters covering U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters’ coverage is being graded as ‘positive,’ ‘neutral’ or ‘negative.’”

One file on a journalist, who is on “the staff of one of America’s pre-eminent newspapers” describes his coverage as “neutral to positive,” but adds that negative stories “could possibly be neutralized” if he were given quotes from military officials.

Another file describes a television reporter as taking a “subjective angle,” but advises that steering him towards “the positive work of a successful operation” could “result in favorable coverage.”

However, neither journalist was outed by Stars and Stripes.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman insisted that the Defense Department does not rate journalists based on the favorability of their coverage.

“We are not doing that here,” he told AFP.

More from the latest Stars and Stripes report:

“They are not doing that [rating reporters], that’s not been a practice for some time — actually since the creation of U.S. Forces–Afghanistan” in October 2008, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters Monday. “I can tell you that the way in which the Department of Defense evaluates an article is its accuracy. It’s a good article if it’s accurate. It’s a bad article if it’s inaccurate. That’s the only measurement that we use here at the Defense Department.”

In a statement e-mailed to Stars and Stripes, Rear Adm. Greg Smith, director of communications for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, wrote: “To imply journalists embedded with our forces only serve to highlight positive aspects of our mission slights the professional journalists who regularly embed with our forces and report what they experience, both good and bad.”

But the Rendon profiles reviewed by Stars and Stripes prove otherwise. One of the profiles evaluates work published as recently as May, indicating that the rating practice did not in fact cease last October as Whitman stated.

And the explicit suggestions contained in the Rendon profiles detailing how best to manipulate reporters’ coverage during their embeds directly contradict the Pentagon’s stated policies governing the embed process.

Stars & Stripes has already experienced government censorship of war coverage first-hand. In June the paper was barred from embedding a report with the 1st Cavalry Unit in Mosul, Iraq, because it “‘refused to highlight’ good news in Iraq that the US military wanted to emphasize,” the paper reported.

That news was met with condemnation from media watchdogs.

The report comes as Washington worries about the increasing unpopularity of the war in Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban is inflicting rising casualties on US and coalition troops.

According to a recent poll, 51 percent of Americans now say the war is not worth fighting.

(with AFP report)

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