Rumsfeld to fight it out in the public opinion front, writes Emad Mekay from New York Washington is talking about a more intensified Pentagon campaign to influence global media coverage of the United States, a move that is likely to harden the battle for greater press freedoms and propaganda free reporting. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that Washington will launch a new drive to spread and defend US views, especially in the so-called war on terror. And if the US effort to influence the media over the past five years is any example, the offensive is likely to take place in two main areas -- the US media and the press in the Arab and Muslim worlds, where Washington sees its strategic influence as pivotal. Critics in the US say the announcement joins a long list of decisions by the Bush administration that is making the once freedom riding country look increasingly racing to join the Middle Eastern autocratic regimes that have long clamped down on their freedom of expression and independent journalists. President Bush's order for the National Security Administration (NSA) to spy on US citizens without obtaining warrants, surveillance of library records, and evidence that the US government is compiling databases on US citizens who disagree with the administration's policies, among other examples, have all contributed to the likelihood of this end. The plan could also complicate matters for Americans already reeling from a voluntary march by the US media towards the right-wing and conservative interpretation of events that gives scant regard for opposing views. According to a study by the US-based media organisation Media Matters for America, released earlier this month, conservative voices have considerably outnumbered liberal voices for the past nine years on the Sunday morning television news shows, among the pinnacles of US journalism. The report includes content analysis of influential shows such as NBC's Meet the Press, CBS's Face the Nation, and ABC's This Week. It classifies each one of the nearly 7,000 guests who appeared during the 1997-2005 period as either Democrat, Republican, conservative, progressive, or neutral. It found that voices opposing the Bush administration's policies, during its two terms, were given only enough space to maintain a veneer of fairness and accuracy. Congressional opponents of the Iraq war, for example, were mostly missing from the Sunday shows, particularly during the period just before the war began in March 2001. "If conservative dominance in this major arena of (US) public opinion-making continues as it has in the past nine years, it may have serious consequences for future policy debates and elections," said David Brock, president of Media Matters. "This study should serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thinks they are seeing balanced discourse on Sunday mornings -- and to those responsible for producing this imbalanced programming." Speaking at the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the US military chief used war terminology to refer to the media. He said that "some of the most critical battles may not be in the mountains of Afghanistan or the streets of Iraq, but in newsrooms -- in places like New York, London, Cairo, and elsewhere." Rumsfeld recommended that the media be part of every move in the so-called war on terror, including an increase in Internet operations, the establishment of 24-hour press operations centres, and training military personnel in other channels of communication. He said the plan will include work to attract more media experts from the private sector to government service and that there will be less emphasis on the print press. Rumsfeld joins Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in moving to the war further to the media front. Last week Rice asked for 74 million dollars to expand broadcasting, the Internet and student exchanges to the Iran by way of destabilising the regime there. But to many independent media analysts, the Bush administration has so often confused propaganda with facts and information, very much to the detriment of accurate and fair reporting and increasingly to the plight of freedom of the press, to be trusted without proper oversight. "I think that in the Pentagon world view facts become instrumentalised," said Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra! Editor!, a magazine by the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "The point of putting out information is to achieve your military objectives. It's not to serve truth in some kind of abstract sense. And once you start looking at it this way, the difference between a true statement and false statement really becomes very little." Rumsfeld cited the Cold War-era efforts, the US Information Agency and Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, widely viewed outside the United States as sophisticated propaganda war machines, as a model for the new offensive. At home, the Bush administration has had some success in influencing the media in the United States, a country with far more sophisticated and discerning media operations. If it happened in the United States, it is more than likely to happen in the Arab world. Last week, US law maker Henry Waxman and other senior Democratic leaders released a new study by the Government Accountability Office, a Congressional auditing body, which found that the Bush administration spent a whopping 1.6 billion dollars in public relations and media spending over the last two and a half years to sway local public opinion. "The government is spending over a billion dollars per year on PR and advertising," said Congressman Waxman. "Careful oversight of this spending is essential given the track record of the Bush administration, which has used taxpayer dollars to fund covert propaganda within the US." The opposition Democrats had requested that GAO conduct that study after evidence emerged last year that the Bush administration had commissioned "covert propaganda" from public relations firms that pushed video news releases that appeared to regular viewers as independent newscasts. The report found that the administration's public relations and advertising contracts spanned a wide range of issues, including message development presenting "the Army's strategic perspective in the Global War on Terrorism". The study found that the Pentagon spent the most on media contracts, some worth 1.1 billion dollars. And all that money was before the new Rumsfeld plan. "They see the mutilation of information that reaches the public as a key part of their war strategy and I think that is a very dangerous way for the military to be looking at their job in a democracy," Naureckas said. "When people talk about the home front they do not realise what a sinister implications that has. The public is seen as another front that the military is fighting out."
