Eric Boehlert, senior fellow at Media Matters for America and author of Lapdogs: How The Press Rolled Over for Bush, discusses the Pentagon’s army of retired generals sent out to disseminate the war party’s propaganda, how the corporate media failed to promote alternative viewpoints to the invasion, the power and danger of ‘groupthink,’ and John McCain’s free-ride from the media.
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Hey, check it out, everybody, it's Eric Bollard from Media Matters for America.
How's it going, Eric?
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me.
It's very good to have you here.
Listen, I was complaining to the audience the other day on the show about, well, I think it was Glenn Greenwald had a great blog entry about how none of the media will cover the New York Times story about them and about how they basically were the shills for the Pentagon for bringing in all these retired generals, quote, unquote, retired, I guess, to push the Pentagon Party line and just calling them experts and so forth.
And I was complaining about how this was so obvious to me that I didn't even realize it was a big story when it broke in the New York Times.
I know it was a long story, but geez, we all know that Don Rumsfeld was sending the generals out to, you know, Buffalo us into this war and to Buffalo us into staying in this war.
Was there anything, Eric, in there that I missed that was actually earth-shattering stuff in that New York Times story from a few weeks back?
Well, I think the details of the close coordination, I think, were interesting and helpful.
It wasn't just sort of, you know, it just wasn't sort of, you know, these are retired generals, so they're sort of sympathetic to the Pentagon and they just happen to be talking about the same things, Pentagon and the Rumsfeld people are talking about.
I mean, you know, they were in meetings, there were talking points, and at least one general told the Times that when he started to stray and began to criticize the war, that he was essentially thrown out of the generals' club, as it were.
So I think the close coordination and also the feeling that the networks clearly must have known there was something going on, and I think that's why the networks have been absolutely silent regarding the story.
I have a pretty strong suspicion there's something else there.
Now did you read Andrew Coburn's book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy?
I did not, no.
He actually has an entire section about this very thing, about how all the generals were brought in and were briefed, and I think it was McCaffrey in his book who, you know, said one thing, I don't know what it was, but it was something minor.
He went on TV and said, well, you know, the Pentagon is saying this, but, you know, I don't know, we might need to come from the north instead of the south, or whatever little detail it was, and he got completely blackballed after that.
He didn't even realize, I guess.
There didn't seem to be much room for freelancing or sort of honest interpretation in terms of these generals who were working with the Pentagon.
It was obvious what the talking points were, it was obvious that they saw their job as not to be independent, honest, sort of military analyst, lots of them, I should say, but really just sort of, you know, a sock puppet, a sort of cog in this noise machine, so no, independent analysis was not, at least for the first year or so, was certainly not encouraged or even tolerated.
Right.
Yeah, and if some of them were under the false impression that, you know, they were just special and weren't really being used, it seems like scenes like what happened to Barry McCaffrey would, you know, disabuse him of those false assumptions right off the bat there.
Hey, whatever happened to Barry?
Well, he said something unpopular on MSNBC and that was it for him.
They all know their place now, no doubt.
Yeah, you know, it's also interesting, I mean, there were, certainly if you were watching the TV, you know, cable news and network news in the winter of 2002 and 2003, certainly you got the impression that basically every retired general was in favor of the war.
It wasn't true.
I mean, there were significant retired military men, and they were men, who were very critical of the war.
Anthony Zeni, who just came back from, you know, extremely high profile duty in the Middle East, you know, overseeing, you know, responsible for troops for the entire Persian Gulf region, harshly critical of the war, this was someone who was handpicked by the Bush administration to go to that part of the world during Bush's first term, and early on in his first term.
Anthony Zeni wasn't parading around on TV, so, you know, if the networks and the cable channels wanted to get a wide array, even of retired military generals who had differing opinion, they could have found them.
They were out there, but it seems like the networks and the cable channels only wanted one kind of retired general, and only getting one kind of spin.
Now, you know, it's funny, Glenn Greenwald did a podcast interview with Aaron Brown from CNN, and, well, the funniest part of it, I thought, was when Aaron Brown says, well, listen, you know, what am I supposed to do, double check every one of these guys, and, you know, what else they're doing for a living, of course, you know, these guys are all working for massive Pentagon contractors, that's a big part of the story.
And he said, listen, you know, if the company hired them, then I have to assume that the company vetted them, and that's good enough for me.
What's the big deal?
Well, I mean, and Aaron, you know, I think Aaron Brown is saying specifically what was I supposed to do, and I think he's got a legitimate, I mean, he's trying to anchor a show, and the producers and the executive producers are in charge of booking the people.
I think he was saying specifically, I'm behind a desk, I'm trying to juggle 300 things, I'm not supposed to fact check these guys.
I think that's a legitimate beef, but we've also sort of heard that same general explanation to be used for the entire news staff, meaning, you know, Brian Williams at NBC, he hasn't reported on it on the air, but he did blog about it a couple weeks ago, and he's basically saying, well, we can't really keep track of what these people do off air, you know, they're doing their own freelance thing, and you know what, if a cable channel or a network had an independent expert on maybe five or six times, then a couple years later, someone realized, oh my gosh, this person was not independent, they had business contracts with people they were promoting, I could see, you know, a news channel would say, oh, jeez, you know, we probably should have looked into that, but if the Media Matters spreadsheet now details, we just posted today, these are people that were on NBC three, four, five, six, 700 times, I mean, this is not, this is not something that flew under the radar five or six times, oh, jeez, we should have double checked, these were permanent parts of the staff, they were at times around almost every day, we didn't know he was on the board of a major defense contract, I mean, give me a break.
Yeah, well, and just imagine, you know, if a peacenik like me was doing a show like this and all my experts were somehow making millions off the oil for food program or something, you know what I mean?
Yeah, and again, you know, it makes no sense, and there is no journalistic explanation for what's going on, and again, that's why we're getting the radio silence from the networks and the cable channels, so they just, they will not discuss it.
All right, I want to play you this clip, it's a real short one, it's from War Made Easy by Norman Solomon, he got this clip of Eason Jordan, an executive at CNN, I love this one.
Well, I think it's important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict, I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started, met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs up on all of them, that was important.
And so, they don't even know that this is something to be embarrassed about, I guess.
Well, the irony was, you know, Eason Jordan had this great idea, before I hire these guys, I'm going to go to the Pentagon and say, is it okay if we hire these guys?
And the guys at the Pentagon must have just been laughing their asses off, because Eason Jordan didn't even know that the Pentagon had prepped all these guys and sent them over there.
And Eason Jordan says, are these people okay?
And the Pentagon probably laughed and said, oh yeah, these guys are great, don't worry.
Yeah, well, and this is the vetting that Aaron Brown is talking about, must be good enough, right?
Well, you know, again, Aaron Brown, I think you probably thought there were probably, you know, actual professionals running CNN at the time, but again, even though it's only been five years, it is sort of hard to remember the absolute patriotic military fervor that was in the air, you know, January and February of 2003.
And it made news people do really dumb things for months and months on end, and Eason Jordan was just, you know, one of many.
And now this really is incredible.
If you go to Mediamatters.org today, it's the top story there.
And you have this spreadsheet, I guess, you put your interns to work and went and did the database and figured out.
Tell us about who these guys are and just these incredible numbers.
You mentioned 700-and-something appearances by one of these generals.
The names probably aren't familiar, but if we saw their, you know, we all, their faces would be automatically familiar.
David Grange at CNN and Donald Shepard and James Marks.
These are all the retired generals.
And yeah, we break it down in terms of how many times they actually appeared on each channel.
And, you know, when you add it all up, you know, the New York Times piece was great and it was really good reporting.
This really breaks it down.
I mean, this really tells you, person by person, channel by channel, how many times they were on.
It just does give, you know, the total impression of how widespread this propaganda initiative was.
And, you know, almost by definition, that's what propaganda is.
It's only really successful if it's a blanket effort.
And this was a blanket effort by the Pentagon and, most importantly, by the willing partners on all the news channels.
I like that phrase, a blanket effort.
You mean just drown out everybody else.
All the Scott Hortons and Eric Bollards in the world can yell at the top of their lungs, but they're never going to be able to rise above this level.
Yeah, no, it didn't matter.
Those people were essentially banned.
If you go back January, February, CNN had no interest in having articulate anti-war critics on the air.
They just weren't and they didn't exist.
And so that was one thing.
I mean, that was a decision the news executives made.
And so here's how lopsided it was.
On the one hand, articulate war critics were essentially written off, which gave the whole playing field to the pro-war pundit.
So that's lopsided, right?
But then you have the Pentagon with its multimillion-dollar, wildly sophisticated propaganda program with the generals.
So, I mean, you know, just picture the scales.
I mean, one scale is on the ground and the other scale is popping up through the roof.
I mean, that was the media landscape.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's this unwritten rule or maybe it's written down somewhere now that you're just never, ever supposed to bring up the Nazis in comparison because it's always just the ultimate, you know, argument ad absurdum or whatever it is.
But the thing is, like, this really puts Goebbels to shame, right?
I mean, I'm not comparing, you know, the body count from the war or anything like that.
But simply in terms of propaganda and our government's ability to BS us into believing what they want, I mean, these guys really make the Nazis look like rank amateurs, don't they?
Well, in terms of the specific question about propaganda, I mean, there's been a law in the books since, I think, 1951 that the United States government cannot spend any federal money for propaganda.
And historically, that had been seen as sort of prepackaged news, sort of fake news.
But I think this initiative of the Pentagon certainly opens the question of what exactly is propaganda and if something like having these people go out under false pretense of being independent and essentially spreading Pentagon talking points, hopefully there will be congressional hearings and that will be one of the questions addressed is does this possibly fall under the long-standing prohibition of government propaganda?
Yeah, the legal definition.
I wouldn't mind seeing some indictments along these lines.
And, you know, think about, you know, in terms of the big lie, how's this for a big lie?
Iraq.
Iraq is a threat to the United States of America.
I mean, is that the silliest thing you ever heard anybody say or what?
Well, it's interesting.
If you go back to, again, if you go back to those dark days in the winter of 2003, I mean, there were lots of people.
I mean, I mentioned Anthony Zinni.
I mean, one of the most respected military generals of his time.
I mean, he thought it was a dumb idea.
He later famously called the whole idea brain fart.
But I remember I was working for a salon at the time and I was writing lots of articles.
I was interviewing lots of experts.
And people I was talking to thought it was a really dumb idea.
I wasn't just trying to find people to say that.
I mean, I was talking to, you know, diplomats and arms experts, you know, nuclear proliferation experts and things like that.
And so if they could figure it out, if I could figure it out, if you could figure it out, why couldn't, you know, all these generals and why couldn't all the pundits?
And of course the answer is there were other pressures at play and the media was scared to death of opposing the war.
And now we're still seeing the damage being done.
This Pentagon propaganda program is just the latest example.
Yeah.
You know, when I was a kid, I learned about groupthink and I guess the big example then was the Bay of Pigs where basically everybody in the room says, yeah, it's a good idea, let's go ahead and do it.
And even though it's a really bad idea, the fact that we all agree that it's a good one means that it is, so we go ahead.
And I was reminded that I was reading this thing by Jim Loeb about Doug Fythe and Paul Wolfowitz getting completely called out in public for some of their, you know, asinine statements about how, well, gee, if we just hadn't called the occupation an occupation, it would have been fine to stay there forever and that kind of thing.
And then one of the things that they said was nobody in government that they ever heard of even imagined that a tactic for the Iraqis might be to basically fall back.
What are they going to do?
Hold their state up?
Fall back and then fight a guerrilla war, you know, an urban warfare, terrorist tactics or insurgent tactics?
Nobody predicted that.
And, of course, actually they did.
The CIA and the State Department did.
But, you know, in 2002, I was sitting here in the chaos garage with just, you know, local cranks in town saying, you know, how's this thing supposed to work out?
And my buddy Ed said, well, this is what's going to happen.
They're going to race the armor toward Baghdad.
The government's going to fall.
But then the fight is going to last years of urban warfare and insurgency and they're never going to be able to occupy that place.
It's going to be an absolute disaster.
I mean, we're talking about people with no credentials at all.
Right, right.
You know, months and months and months before the war even started.
Yeah, it didn't seem like that.
You know, it didn't seem like it took, you know, a scientist to figure out what was going to happen or at least raise questions about it.
But the question, the point you made about no one even thinking that there might be insurgency, I mean, that just really indicates what an insular world they were dealing with.
And again, you bring it back to the press.
The press did an awful job trying to expand that insular world because basically they were just having the same debate that the White House and the Pentagon wanted the press to have.
And again, it goes back to not having, really banning essentially, you know, pro-war critics from that debate.
It was a one-way debate.
Yeah, well, and one of the arguments that they make to excuse themselves now, and I think this was something that Aaron Brown had mentioned to Glenn Greenwald, was that, well, you know, we weren't really interviewing these guys about whether or not we should have a war.
We were interviewing them about, and I guess that sort of ignores all the subtext.
You know, even if that's the main thrust of the interview of a general, there's still going to be all kinds of little talking points dropped throughout that basically make it seem inevitable.
If any of these retired generals thought it was a bad idea, the viewer would have picked that up almost immediately.
Right.
So as Aaron Brown was really saying is, you know, we had a working assumption there would be a war, did you get to that working assumption?
Did you come to that in February of 203, January, December 202?
And when you came to that working assumption there would be a war, when did the debate actually take place of would there be a war?
I seem to have missed it, and a lot of other people missed it too.
All right, now, so when I'm looking at this list of these retired generals and all their hundreds and hundreds and thousands, I guess, of media appearances here, what sort of military industrial complex firms were these men working for at the time?
I mean, if you don't know specific names to specific boards of directors, that's all right, but just in general, who are these guys now that they're no longer generals in the Pentagon?
You know, they're on a lot of board of directors, you know, all the big defense contractors, Raytheon, Boeing, things like that.
I mean, this is where a lot of them end up, certainly if you get to three, four star general territory.
So a lot of them had working contacts with military contractors who A, were certainly going to profit from a war, and were certainly going to profit from, ironically, a long war where they need to sort of re-up the troops.
B, the generals were being treated to sort of inside access to Iraq, courtesy of the Pentagon, which they could then parlay into landing new clients by showing how they had inside access to the Pentagon, how they were getting special treatment in the Green Zone.
So that was another way they were theoretically could sort of cash in and use that to bolster their clients.
None of this was ever talked about on the TV, and the generals were never you know, virtually never described on the air as having any sort of business contacts, you know, with the sort of industrial war complex.
So that was just sort of another part of hidden propaganda that was going on.
And a lot of them, a couple of them, Glenn Greenwald pointed out a couple weeks ago, the two main generals for NBC, you know, again, these were their independent military analysts, they had signed on in either 201 or 202 to this, you know, neocon think tank initiative that America should invade Iraq.
So right after 9-11, the two generals NBC was using, were advocating an invasion of Iraq.
But again, when they appeared time after time on MSNBC and NBC, viewers were never told that these guys wanted to invade Iraq years ago, and that they were not really independent, and that they had been cheerleading this for years.
Alright, if you have a little bit more time, I want to ask you a bit about this book.
I just got it here, I haven't actually had a chance to read it yet, but it's put out by you guys at Media Matters for America, it's called Free Ride, John McCain and the media.
And I have to tell you Eric, I've noticed that John McCain is well, wrong about everything, and I'm starting to think that he's actually really dumb on the level of George Bush, that here you know, after years and years of war he can't even begin to tell the different factions apart in Iraq, for example.
And yet, TV continues to call this guy a foreign policy expert.
That's the biggest and best credential that he has, is that he knows everything about who the US government ought to be killing overseas at any given time.
And I just wonder if you can, you know, help me understand why it is that the reporters love this guy so much.
Frankly, I just don't see what's so lovable about him.
Well, in general reporters, when it comes to presidential campaigns, are very differential to Republican figures.
They, particularly in the last few cycles, with Bush in 2000, 2004, and now McCain they really admire what they see as sort of this man's man approach with McCain.
And by contrast, they constantly ridicule Democratic candidates as sort of being effeminate and out of touch.
You know, Republican presidential candidates are you know, someone you want to have a beer with, as if that, you know, matters in electing presidents.
But particularly with McCain, they really admire his, you know, his Vietnam service.
You know, let's admit, a lot of these high, high profile media figures are from the baby boom generation, didn't go to Vietnam, did everything they could not to go to Vietnam.
Here's this guy who served and was a POW.
So there's a certain amount of I don't want to put everyone on the couch, but there's a certain psychology they're really admiring and maybe wishing that, you know, feeling guilty about the role that, you know, these baby boomers played.
I love his life story.
Obviously they've anointed him a maverick for going on a decade now, but as we point out in the book, you know, that tag is just really, it doesn't really fit.
It's been wildly exaggerated.
And today, time and time again, when McCain does these flip-flops that sort of puncture that maverick status, the press just sort of looks the other way and continues to, you know, pump it up.
Yeah, or they just redefine maverick to mean, oh, well, he changes his mind all the time.
You know, isn't that great?
Well, usually they just ignore when he changes his mind.
Taxes, immigration, torture, things like that.
It's not really of interest to them.
But they do love the maverick status.
And now, actually, the sort of phase two, they're turning that maverick tag into sort of a brand.
And McCain now has his own brand, which sort of elevates him into this sort of larger-than-life figure.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
I'm not a big fan of the opposition, whichever it may be, either.
But, I don't know.
The idea that John McCain even stands a chance after eight years of George Bush, it's, I don't know who else to point the finger at other than TV News.
It's got to be all their fault, because in the real world, with Americans, you know, basing their decisions on things that actually happen and things like that couldn't possibly be that this guy even stands a chance.
It is amazing, and I think not all of it, but a good chunk of it has to do with his press treatment.
I mean, you know, look, Obama has sort of moved ahead in some of the polls, but in general he appears to be basically tied with the Democrat.
You know, this is a guy who, compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars that Clinton and Obama have raised, McCain has done very poorly on the fundraising.
His campaign isn't nearly as creative in any way as the Democrats, or robust, but he's got the press.
And that is hugely important.
All that free media, almost all of it is fawning.
If it weren't for the media, I think if it weren't for the press, that McCain would probably be trailing by 15 or 16 points, for the exact reasons that I mentioned.
I mean, Bush is 28 percent or something like that, favorable.
A percentage of Americans think the country is heading the wrong track, is off the charts.
But McCain clearly does have a shot.
And I think a lot of it is the press to thank for a lot of that.
Yeah, it really is incredible.
I know a lot of times I just think, you know, if only I was one of these trust fund kids with millions of dollars or the political ads that I could make, you know, McCain shall be away, or, you know, whatever.
There's got to be a million of them.
Yeah, I don't know.
It is amazing.
I mean, it's a sad enough situation that all we have to choose from is Republicans or Democrats anyway.
But when McCain's one of our very few choices, I think we're in a pretty bad way here.
Alright, hey, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Okay, I'll talk to you soon.
Alright.
Everybody, that's Eric Bollert from Media Matters for America.
And check out the book.
It's a free ride, John McCain and the Media by David Brock and Paul Waldman.
And check out the website, MediaMatters.org We'll be back on anti-war radio right after this.
