Media Scandals Across the Arab Western Divide

Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Shock and awe has given way to a shocking media scandal of the week in Iraq.

The latest revelations of pay for play journalism, admitted now to some degree by the Pentagon, is that US government funds are going to pay off or otherwise subsidize journalists.

Blogger Tony Pierce notes that “this week the LA Times broke the story that the U.S. Military had hired several companies to carry out 'strategic communications' in foreign countries with heavy US Military presence, including a company once called Iraqex, but now called Lincoln Group. The Times discovered that it turned out that many of those communications involved paying Iraqi newspapers to run US propaganda, and yesterday the Pentagon admitted the Times was right, that the US was back in the propaganda biz.”

This Lincoln Group is just one part of the information warfare strategy that drives the Bush strategy in Iraq. Bullets and “bullet points,” in Paul Krugman’s phrase, have long been the twin towers of the Bush strategy to engineer perceptions and win support for the Iraq war and its political objectives.

Does anyone remember the ill-fated Office of Strategic Communications run by Iran Contra alumnus John Poindexter with its plan for planting stories favorable to US goals in the press overseas? When it was first announced, and exposed back in 2003, there was a media uproar followed by an announcement that the plan was being shelved and the office closed.

Except Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made clear he was going to do it anyway - but under a different name. And he did.

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