Realizing that "by now, talk of the Iranian elections will have traversed into the abyss of yesterday’s news," Warehouse magazine contributing writer Mohsen al Attar (7/10/09) still thinks "the events narrate a highly educational tale about the role of media in present-day society":

Few would question the media machine's efficiency. Once a major media outlet decides to run with a story--as was done with the Iranian election protests--there is little to arrest its circulation or to challenge the implications the particular telling makes.

Of the Iranians and non-Iranians supporting the protests--and they are numerous in Canada alone--an important distinction can be made between those reacting to the events and those reacting to the story of the events. I suspect those belonging to the former must possess a perpetual feeling of dissatisfaction with the media’s porous and flimsy representation of Iranian politics, as if social reality can always be tucked away in neat little binaries: tradition and modernity, religious and secular, legitimate and illegitimate.

Al Attar goes on to contrast Amira Haas' maxim that "the role of the media is to monitor the centers of power" with the appropriate term for such "stories that contain little substance, an obvious slant and are devoid of any critical analysis: propaganda." In al Attar's view, "cheerleading a particular position--there is a link between Iraq and al Qaeda, Hugo Chávez is a bad man, the solution to the economic crisis is to throw more money at the financiers who got us into the mess--is the role of a propaganda machine."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "David Barsamian on Iran Upheaval" (6/26/09).

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?"

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.