The current Democracy Now! (5/8/09) features New York Times Pentagon Pundits reporter David Barstow giving Amy Goodman the background on the U.S. military's retraction of a report clearing itself of domestic propaganda wrongdoing:

So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that as soon as the stories ran, the program itself was suspended by the Pentagon, pending the outcome of this investigation. But what happened earlier this week was really unusual. It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.

And the reason why they did is because after the report was released, it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, significant factual problems with it. The one that jumped out to me immediately as I read through the report for the first time was that it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who's probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors.

In a piece of reality too large for even the Pentagon to deny, the most prominent paper in the U.S. had published Barstow's "5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors" as board-member, consultant and adviser--which much corporate media apparently cared little about, offering as they do, to this day, a platform for propaganda-worker McCaffrey's conflicted views.

During coverage of the Obama administration's 100-day mark, MSNBC had war reporter Richard Engel and anchor Tamron Hall interview MSNBC analyst Barry McCaffrey, who CJR.org's Clint Hendler (4/29/09) calls "the retired army general whose many conflicts of interest have been analyzed by David Barstow's now-Pulitzer Prize winning reporting for the New York Times." When asked by Engel about attempts to "draw away the Taliban's source of funding by cutting down the opium crop or burning it or whatever," McCaffrey was emphatic: "I think we’ve got to take it on. But, you know, the lead agent can't be U.S. combat troops. It's got to be Afghans chopping down opium poppy." Hendler thinks he knows the source of McCaffrey's enthusiasm, even if the MSNBCers don't (or at least aren't saying):

Neither Hall, Engel nor McCaffrey made mention of DynCorp, a major military contractor that's doing exactly that--training Afghans to eradicate poppies.

Nor did they mention that McCaffrey sits on DynCorp's board, which according to federal contracting records, garnered contracts in 2008 and 2009 worth over $323 million dollars with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, including its work in Afghanistan.

Read more on media treatment of Barry McCaffrey and his Pentagon brethren in the FAIR publication Extra! Update: "Network News Blackout on Pentagon Pundits" (6/08) by Isabel Macdonald.