As I said in my post Influencers Gone Wild in the Blogosphere, it would only be shrewd to consider that there might be hidden allegiances and agendas amongst the bloggers and other influencers you seek to approach for coverage.
But it takes brilliance – dark brilliance – to stack the deck of these allegiances and exploit them to the advantage of your communications program.
That is exactly what the Pentagon and Bush administration have done, according to a front page article in the Sunday NY Times: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Agenda.
According to the article, first the Pentagon and then the State Department courted and groomed key “influentials” such as retired military leaders to influence TV coverage of the Iraqi war progress and policy.
The arrangement was convenient for all involved. The network and cable news broadcasts got their military expert talking heads, the Bush administration got to propogate their messages and talking points through proxies, and the military analysts got access to the highest levels of the Bush Administration (as well as occasional TV consulting fees.)
Very profitable access, as it turns out, since it turns out that these experts also generally had close ties to military contractors – entities which could trade on and otherwise exploit the access.
Talk about an unholy alliance!
How compliant were these analysts? According to the article:
…In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access….
“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said….
…Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions…”
…Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena…”
You have to hand it to the Bush administration. If they were half as smart formulating and implementing policy as they were Machievallian in influencing the headlines, we’d be in a much better place as a nation today.
Although the effort was deemed to be a sucess by a number of measures, one has to ask what was gained in applying lipstick to the proverbial pig, as they did. We don’t seem to be much closer to getting out of Iraq, I think most people still consider the policy and execution of it to be misguided, and real lives have been at stake.
