Stars and Stripes reporters Charlie Reed, Kevin Baron and Leo Shane III (8/27/09) have an update on the military paper's recent exposure of Iraqi National Congress fabricators the Rendon Group helping the Pentagon in Screening New Embeds in Afghanistan "to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the U.S. military in a positive light."

A reporter profile obtained by Stars and Stripes "evaluates work published as recently as May, indicating that the rating practice did not in fact cease last October" as claimed by a Pentagon representative, and "explicit suggestions contained in the Rendon profiles detailing how best to manipulate reporters coverage... directly contradict the Pentagon’s stated policies"--purporting to be "in no way intended to prevent release of embarrassing, negative or derogatory information."

Stars and Stripes has obtained documents that prove that reporters' coverage is being graded as "positive," "neutral" or "negative."

Moreover, the documents--recent confidential profiles of the work of individual reporters prepared by a Pentagon contractor--indicate that the ratings are intended to help Pentagon image-makers manipulate the types of stories that reporters produce while they are embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

One reporter on the staff of one of America's pre-eminent newspapers is rated in a Pentagon report as "neutral to positive" in his coverage of the U.S. military. Any negative stories he writes "could possibly be neutralized" by feeding him mitigating quotes from military officials.

But really, what are the odds of that working?

In his Week in Review piece wondering if Obama's Afghanistan policy is akin to LBJ and Vietnam, New York Times reporter Peter Baker notes that the public mood is seeping into the media:

That growing disenchantment in the countryside is increasingly mirrored in Washington, where liberals in Congress are speaking out more vocally against the Afghan war and newspapers are filled with more columns questioning America’s involvement.

Newspapers are filled with what now? It doesn't feel that way to me, but surely Baker must have some evidence. Which he does:

The cover of the latest Economist is headlined "Afghanistan: The Growing Threat of Failure."

Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration official turned critic, wrote in the New York Times last week that what he once considered a war of necessity has become a war of choice. While he still supports it, he argued that there are now alternatives to a large-scale troop presence, like drone attacks on suspected terrorists, more development aid and expanded training of Afghan police and soldiers.

A British magazine and a Times op-ed from someone who supports the war? That's not exactly what I was expecting when I was told newspapers were "filled" with dissenting views.

As if journalists "embedding" with U.S. troops isn't troubling enough, Stars and Stripes is reporting that reporters looking to embed with U.S. troops in Afghanistan will face some troubling screening:

As more journalists seek permission to accompany U.S. forces engaged in escalating military operations in Afghanistan, many of them could be screened by a controversial Washington-based public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the U.S. military in a positive light.

U.S. public affairs officials in Afghanistan acknowledged to Stars and Stripes that any reporter seeking to embed with U.S. forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group, which gained notoriety in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq for its work helping to create the Iraqi National Congress. That opposition group, reportedly funded by the CIA, furnished much of the false information about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion.

We're told that the review is not designed to exclude reporters who might be too critical, though in practice that is how it's been used:

U.S. Army officials in Iraq engaged in a similar vetting practice two months ago, when they barred a Stars and Stripes reporter from embedding with a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division because the reporter "refused to highlight" good news that military commanders wanted to emphasize.

Back in May, CBS' 60 Minutes aired a terrible report on the Air Force's use of drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan-- see FAIR's action alert for all the details. CBS never responded to the criticism, but they did re-air the segment this past Sunday, without any major changes. To let CBS know how you feel about this one-sided reporting, here's the contact info:

CONTACT:
CBS
60 Minutes
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

Email: 60m@cbsnews.com
Phone: (212) 975-3247

The escalation of the Afghanistan war is the "Topic A" discussion on the Washington Post op-ed page on Sunday (it's a regular feature where they ask a panel of Important People to weigh in on an issue of the day).

The title was "How Many Troops for Afghanistan?"--one can already spot the problem with that--but the panel they assembled left  a lot to be desired. On the one hand, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (a strong critic of escalation) was given space to make his argument. But his presenced was 'balanced' by four others, three of whom are definitely pro-escalation (they quibble over the details, perhaps) and one pollster who addressed the public opinion problems--i.e., the Afghanistan war isn't popular.

So besides Kucinich, the Post gave readers former Bush and Reagan aide Ed Rogers (escalation "is necessary to avoid the political and security debacle that would arise from an American failure there"), Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center ("The public opinion climate for sending more troops is difficult--but not impossible"), Harvard professor--and former special assistant to George W. Bush--Meghan Sullivan (Obama "should reject three arguments currently made against accepting a recommendation for more troops"), and Georgetown professor Andrew Natsios (stability in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan "can not be achieved without substantially more U.S. and allied troops conducting a classic counterinsurgency campaign to take and hold territory and protect the civilian population.")

Some debate.

As "official Washington is buzzing about 'metrics'" of success in the U.S. war on Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (ZNet, 8/13/09) notes of media's persistent question, "Can the war in Afghanistan be successful?"--"Don't ask the dead":

On August 7, under the headline "White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success," a New York Times story made a splash. "As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won."

Don't ask the dead. They don't count.

The Times article went on: "Those 'metrics' of success, demanded by Congress and eagerly awaited by the military, are seen as crucial if the president is to convince Capitol Hill and the country that his revamped strategy is working."

But, Solomon says, "routinely, the dominant political and media calculus renders the dead as digits and widgets, moved around on spreadsheets and news pages. The victims of war are hardly seen as people by the numbed sophisticates who can measure just about anything but the value of a human life." Thus prompting Solomon's question to all of us: "The dead can't speak up. What's our excuse?"

Johann Hari (ZNet, 8/6/09) has an in-depth write-up of "the story of Malalai Joya" that "turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out":

In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for. Here is a young Afghan woman who set up a secret underground school for girls under the Taliban and--when they were toppled--cast off the burka, ran for parliament, and took on the religious fundamentalists.

But she says: "Dust has been thrown into the eyes of the world by your governments. You have not been told the truth. The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women. Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords. [That is] what your soldiers are dying for." Instead of being liberated, she is on the brink of being killed.

In short, Hari tells us, "the story of Joya is the story of another Afghanistan--the one behind the burka, and behind the propaganda." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Sonali Kolhatkar on Afghan Women and the War" (7/31/09).

Afghanistan writer Ann Jones has an essay on TomDispatch (7/16/09) in which she calls The Fixer "the best documentary I've seen on Afghanistan--so good it's hard to imagine a better one." Her description of a scene she found particularly moving demonstrates the harsh reality of unembedded reporting, begetting a corporate media output that merits her headline, "Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions":

It is 2006, late in the year. A reporter stands on a rocky hillside near the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and points a wobbly camera at dark-clad gunmen ranged at a distance before him. They've wrapped the tails of their turbans to mask their faces. They carry their Kalashnikovs at the ready. The reporter shouts a question: "Does the Taliban receive support from Pakistan?"

As the camera jumps about to find the Talib who is speaking, a translator voices his answer: "Yes, Pakistan stands with us. On the other side of the border, we have our offices there. Some people in Pakistan is supporting us and the government of Pakistan does not say anything to us. They provide us with everything."

The reporter--Christian Parenti of the Nation magazine--has his story. For years, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has charged Pakistan with backing the Taliban, while Pakistan's then-President Musharraf denied it, and officials of the Bush administration looked the other way. Now, Parenti has the word of armed Taliban. This is the kind of story a foreign correspondent can't get without a fixer; that is, a local guy who knows the language, the local politics, the protocols of custom--and how to arrange a meeting like this in the middle of nowhere with men who might kill you.

Having beaten a hasty retreat from "an approaching reconnaissance plane," a relieved Parenti smiles and "describes the man sitting beside him--Ajmal Nashqbandi, a 24-year-old Pashtun from Kabul--as 'the best fixer in Afghanistan.'" But Jones tells us that viewers "already know what Parenti doesn't (because filmmaker Ian Olds has told us up front before the titles even hit the screen): Soon the fixer will be dead, murdered by the Taliban."

The latest segment to be made available online (7/7/09) from Robert Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan documentary features the president of the Global Fund for Women Kavita Ramdas challenging U.S. media tropes about improved women's conditions since the U.S. invasion: "The perception of the women of Afghanistan having been severely oppressed only under the regime of the Taliban, and then having been freed by the united States' military intervention in 2001, is a false perception."

The film continues:

Ann Jones, author Kabul in Winter: We got reports back that indeed that had been accomplished and the women had thrown off their burqas and gone back to school and gone back to work and things were wonderful for women. This is complete mythology. It didn't happen.

Member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan [having to speak with her image blurred for her own protection]: Now the cases of violence against women are more than the Taliban time. There is 23 rape cases in two months in North Afghanistan. There is a lot of violence against women in West Afghanistan.

As Ramdas describes "rape, pillage, plunder, the abduction of young girls, the threatening of schoolteachers," a November 2008 BBC report narrator vocalizes that which cannot be spoken in U.S. media: "Girls attacked with acid for daring to go to school. Despite initial gains, women's rights, and even women themselves, are increasingly under attack."

Llisten to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Robert Greenwald on Rethink Afghanistan" (5/1/09).

New York Times reporter John F. Burns turned in a piece on Sunday about the debate in Britain over the Afghanistan war ("Criticism of Afghan War Is on the Rise in Britain," 7/12/09), in light of the increase in British casualties in recent weeks. Burns writes:

So far, however, the reaction in Britain has not run to the kind of popular groundswell for withdrawal that President George W. Bush faced when the war in Iraq worsened after his re-election in 2004.

To careful readers of the Times, this is more than a little jarring. While there is certainly some truth to the idea that there was a "popular groundswell" in the United States in favor of withdrawal, the paper spent quite a bit of time after 2004 trying to convince readers that withdrawing troops from Iraq was a terrible idea, and not a very popular one (among Americans or Iraqis). It's nice that in 2009, in a story about a different country and a different war, this reality is finally allowed to slip into the paper's reporting.

What Burns is really seeing in Britain is something else entirely--an "outcry from those who say the government must answer for the growing number of soldiers killed because of what they describe as an underfinanced defense budget, $55 billion this year." It's hard to say how prevalent these feelings are, but the assumption is that support for withdrawal is minimal. Recent polls suggest otherwise, however; while the recent British deaths have not pushed the public firmly in either direction, those who want to get out of that country are a sizable share of the population.

As the Guardian reported yesterday on its new survey, "Today's poll findings show that 42 percent are in favour of the immediate withdrawal of British troops, and a further 14 percent want them home by the end of the year." This was the same finding that the pollsters had recorded in 2006. In what year this pro-withdrawal majority will be noticed by the Paper of Record is anyone's guess.

Noting how "the president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now," FAIR associate Norman Solomon is letting Huffington Post readers know (7/9/09) "that's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually":

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

Solomon warns that "'escalation' isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States":

"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad--nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper--nothing too abrupt or jarring....

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

While "Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set" and "sounded an open-ended note: 'There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan,'" Solomon writes that the announcement "was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place."

Solomon foresees that "war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come 'piecemeal'--'with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.'" For a look "beyond how many more troops and when to send them"--the only major questions about Afghanistan regularly given venue in corporate media--listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Ann Jones on Afghanistan" (1/23/09).

Noticing that "the New York Times used three square inches of newsprint on Tuesday to dispatch two U.S. Army soldiers under the headline 'Names of the Dead,'" Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 7/1/09) points out how apparently "there wasn't enough room for any numbers, names or ages of Afghans who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations."

Having observed wartime media long enough to know that "that's the way routine death stories go," Solomon has also observed that "reporting on life is like that, and reporting on death is like that: even more so when the media lenses are ground with ideology, nationalism and economic convenience":

The conventional wisdom of press and state insists that the U.S. war effort must do more than go on--it must escalate--in the name of human decency. The political rhetoric in Washington is close to 100 percent humanitarian, while the new supplemental infusion of U.S. spending for Afghanistan is 90 percent military.

Inside a contrived news frame, destruction can nurture life. In media myth, we can be well-informed and ignorant of war's realities. Along the way, the benefits of numbed quiescence and muffled dissent are vastly overrated.

Listen to Solomon's recent appearance on the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Norman Solomon on Obama's Inauguration" (1/23/09).

Calling the six months of unanimous news media silence on New York Times reporter David Rohde's kidnapping "the most amazing press blackout on a major event that I have ever seen," Greg Mitchell (Editor & Publisher, 6/23/09) now wonders

if a great debate will break out over media ethics in not reporting a story involving one of their own when they so eagerly rush out piece about nearly everything else. I imagine some may claim that the blackout would not have held if a smaller paper, not the mighty New York Times, had been involved. Or is saving this life (actually two, there was a local reporter also snatched) self-evidently justification enough?

Bob Steele, the Poynter media ethicist, summed it up well for [E&P's Joe] Strupp this weekend: "News organizations are balancing competing obligations if a journalist is kidnapped or detained. The primary obligation to the public is to report accurately and timely on meaningful events. If you have a journalist who is detained or kidnapped, that will generally reach the level of newsworthiness. News organizations also have an equal obligation to minimize harm. That means showing care and caution to not further endanger someone whose life may be in jeopardy. These are competing obligations and loyalties."

High ideals to be sure, but Steele comes back to what may be the overriding realistic factor here: "There is also a matter of fairness and consistency. Would a news organization apply different standards in the case of a government diplomat or a business executive or a tourist than they would one of their own?"

Investigative reporter Gareth Porter's careful reading (Dissident Voice, 6/28/09) of "the official military investigation into the disastrous May 4 airstrike in Farah province" of Afghanistan, which "omitted key details" and "gave no explanation" for reasserting "that only about 26 civilians had been killed"--"well-documented reports by the government and by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission [showed] that between 97 and 147 people were killed"--yields a "central contradiction between the report and the U.S. military's 'human shields' argument" that "was allowed to pass unnoticed in the extremely low-key news media coverage of the report." In fact,

news coverage of the report has focused either on the official estimate of only 26 civilian deaths and the much larger number of Taliban casualties or on the absence of blame on the part of U.S. military personnel found by the investigators.

The Associated Press reported that the United States had "accidentally killed an estimated 26 Afghan civilians last month when a warplane did not strictly adhere to rules for bombing."

The New York Times led with the fact that the investigation had called for "additional training" of U.S. air crews and ground forces but did hold any personnel "culpable" for failing to follow the existing rules of engagement.

Contributing to these outlets' dissembling on behalf of U.S. troops' bloody actions, Porter found that "none of the news media reporting on the highly expurgated version of the investigation pointed out that it had confirmed, in effect, the version of the event that had been put forward by residents of the bombed villages." Listen to more about Afghanistan deceptions in U.S. media on the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Gareth Porter on the Afghanistan Surge" (4/3/09).

NPR Check blogger Mytwords has some advice (6/14/09) "in these times of austerity and job 'shedding' at NPR": "Instead of spending all the money it must take to embed a reporter like Tom Bowman with the U.S. military in Afghanistan, why not cut him out of the picture and just hand a microphone to one of the officers or commanders there?":

Heck, if that's too expensive, why not just get on the Internets and pull some hard-hitting journalism from the military website of whatever unit Tom would have been embedded with? It sure would be a lot cheaper, even though it would mean we wouldn't get the kind of critical insight that Bowman coughed up for us this morning:

What they're going to be doing is something similar to what they did in Anbar province in Iraq. They're going to move out into the countryside and really live among the people--and that's the whole point here, is the counterinsurgency technique is to live among the people, provide security and eventually help rebuild this part of Afghanistan.

Momentarily dropping his sarcasm for some straightforward outrage, Mytwords asks, "Could you have a more sanitized, propaganda-laden description of the often repressive, brutal and violent strategy of counterinsurgency?"