I Just Love the Smell of Propaganda in the Morning

I have to wonder just how much this photo- op cost us little people, err, taxpayers, and how much of that money could have gone to veterans instead:

"...But contrary to what many television networks erroneously reported, the operation was by no means the largest use of airpower since the start of the war. ("Air Assault" is a military term that refers specifically to transporting troops into an area.) In fact, there were no air strikes and no leading insurgents were nabbed in an operation that some skeptical military analysts described as little more than a photo op. What's more, there were no shots fired at all and the units had met no resistance, said the U.S. and Iraqi commanders."

I also have to wonder just who the reporters on the ground were who managed to fabricate a mission that did not exist and the networks that simply took the "just trust us" word for it again.

Most of them it seems and here are but a few:

CNN
AP
Reuters

Or are the reporters feeding the networks and papers this nifty ad campaign actually military contractors planting their own nifty stories in the news wire? Because it is not like our military does not do such things abroad. Remember the Rendon Group and paying Iarqi journalists by using them as a proxy so as to be far removed from the smell of propaganda?

The question is, do they do it domestically?

In the States there has been some speculation that someone is on the dole or may have actually planted a few false news pieces, given the shockingly all-but incompetent reporting by the mainstream press leading up to the Iraq war. One need only say "Judith Miller" to get the full scope of the damage this kind of pay-per-write ethics has done to the press and real journalists. That is not to say Madam Miller was working for the military, no of course not. That would require the kind of clearances that would literally bar a journalist from telling the truth, relying only on military talking points. No, not our Judy and anyway, she was already a cancer at the Times far before the war when she braved the bio-world of weaponry all alone, with only her Prada bag for comfort.

Do they do it domestically?

We know that the military is prohibited from running the kind of propaganda (or psyops) in this country that it runs loose with abroad. Miller, well no, she can float lies camouflaged as news quite legally, but not the military. Yet the nagging feeling is there of course, given the shocking complicity of our corporate press which in most cases shares the same bosses as the military industrial complex does or rather, is part of the same military industrial complex.

I suppose we should not worry, however, because our military's domestic activities are otherwise occupied in the illegal surveillance of peace activists and environmentalists to cause any propaganda type mischief.

Or Not

"Recounting the pre-visit days for WLOX and the Sun Herald, Jerry Akins, who received Bush, mentioned that on the Friday before Bush arrived, two men approached him identifying themselves as members of the media.

"He said the men told him they were with Fox News out of Houston, Texas, and were on a "scouting mission" for a story on new construction. They took pictures inside Akins' house, which is under construction and looked up and down the road in the neighborhood."

Who could this be? Rendon, is that you again? Come on; tell the truth, just between us. Eh?