Nobody interested in how people in power manipulate public opinion can afford to miss the exposé of the Bush administration’s use of “experts” to sell the Iraq war and defend itself over Guantanamo. This is an old-fashioned investigative scoop by a New York Times reporter, David Barstow, that is convulsing the US media with accusation and counter-accusation — a huge story there that has made surprisingly few ripples here, in the UK. It should.
The Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, focusing on people who were, or would become, defense analysts hired by the main broadcasters — Fox News above all, but NBC, CNN, CBS and ABC too. They weren’t paid to spin the Pentagon line, at least in money. Instead, they got access: briefings with senior administration figures, from Dick Cheney down, and military leaders; free trips to Iraq and Guantanamo; and access to classified intelligence.
Since these experts were often also working for large military contractors, scrambling for business created by the “war on terror”, this access and the inside track it demonstrated, was worth far more to them than any salary check. One, John Garrett, a retired army colonel and analyst for Fox News, is quoted openly admitting it helped his work for a lobbyist with military equipment clients: “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. That’s good for everybody.”
Except, perhaps, the Iraqis, the Americans who died or were maimed in Iraq, those tortured or held wrongly in camps and the American people, who until recently had little idea about the tight little circles linking big money, the White House, and those reassuringly professional ex-military types who went out selling propaganda about the war.
The Barstow story was based on two years of digging and the use of freedom of information law, which eventually disgorged 8,000 pages of government documents. These show exactly how Donald Rumsfeld and his staff molded a compliant and eager group of televisual talking heads, people with more authority than mere politicians or officials, into what Barstow calls “a kind of media Trojan horse ... intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks”.
The row ignited by the story is still flaring in the US. It shows that the US military establishment learned the lessons of Vietnam, when it comprehensively lost the propaganda fight. This time, it didn’t just control the apparently objective experts, it distributed fawning “news segments” to local TV stations and paid columnists to write what the Pentagon wanted. So why has this huge scandal caused so little interest here?
The Pentagon went for military experts because it had noticed the TV networks’ own specialist correspondents were no longer trusted, or even getting much airtime. British telly has its faults, but people such as the BBC’s Frank Gardner and John Simpson, and other specialists, are probably more trusted than the average ex-general. American TV has paid a price for years of hype, exaggeration and political spin.
It is hard to envisage such a cozy relationship between the British government and British ex-army types and analysts. Too many former generals are seething about Labour spending priorities, or hated Blair and Brown all along, for it to be so smooth. When military chiefs are on the British airwaves, or writing in British newspapers, they are far likelier to be hammering the Treasury, complaining about rotten accommodation and criticizing ministers for overstretch, than to be boosting the war strategy in Iraq or Afghanistan. And if they did suddenly turn round and start to say it was all going terrifically well, the nation would laugh in disbelief.
Perhaps there are some strengths in our much-abused public culture after all? We have to be cautious. There have been those huge bribery scandals. But in Britain, Iraq was the moment when official spin was finally disgraced.
So what are the darker messages for us from this American scandal? I was struck by the way in which the deal between the analysts, the TV bosses, the Pentagon and — behind them all —- the military contractors, never needed to be explicit. The Pentagon didn’t need to offer cash, or lean on anyone. The TV networks did not ask too much about their experts’ sources of information, or their outside interests. It was all nods and winks. Does this begin to sound familiar? It wasn’t cash for peerages. It was propaganda for access. But isn’t the underlying structure — you do me a favor, I’ll see you right, while neither of us says a word — just the same?
In this country, politicians are rarely in the pocket of big industrial concerns, not least because there are hardly any big industrial concerns left. But what about our real source of power — the big banks, hedge funds and retail barons, for whom the playing field is almost always smoothed? How often are they cross-questioned in the media? About the only tycoons most people have heard of are Alan Sugar and Richard Branson. The rest are names flitting across the business pages, only impinging on the rest of us when a bank is in trouble or because of personal scandal. If business correspondents want star access, they have to mind their language and treat the City barons with deference and respect. They, not the military or the Ministry of Defense, are the power that our democracy never really talks about. The Americans have the military-industrial-media complex. We have an economy run by high-rolling financial gamblers, shielded by politicians and rarely confronted by our media — a closed world to most people, whose popular propaganda has all been about glossy mortgage deals, rocketing property prices and cheap food, and whose leading figures have been hobnobbing with Cabinet ministers and being whisked off to the Lords since the early 1980s.
That system is now falling apart, just as the naive optimism of America’s Iraq hawks fell apart when that country descended into chaos. Eventually, reality intrudes. Then the backlash comes. The “experts” are upended. We see the cost of not having an honest, open argument, whether about Pentagon strategy or about how the banking system really works, and the media feel embarrassed: “How did we miss that?” In Washington, and elsewhere, the answers are often the same. It comes down to unspoken deals between powerful people, and smiling faces telling fairy tales.
