... are a damn sight better than the wages of journalism.
The Murdoch press has dropped the Gilligan story in favour of the last stand of the brothers Hussein. Not surprising, really. It’s easier than admitting you were wrong. It’s easier than admitting your agenda. It’s easier than admitting you are the junkyard dogs of media, an arrant bunch of establishment toadies and the shameless tools of Rupe’s global growth strategy.
The Guardian picks being right and ethical may not be enough to save the BBC. Blair and Campbell want revenge. They want the Beeb de-fanged.
Reportedly journos at News were going about their business preparing their usual “balanced” reports on the row, but word came down from on high: tear the BBC apart. It was enough to make even hardened News Corp hacks uncomfortable.
Now regular readers may wonder what’s happened to the Girlie. Well, she’s being, like, totally a real Girlie-swot. It’s exam time over here and she’s upstairs studying – at least that's what she tells me.
While Girlie's being boring I’ve been doing a bit of research on Rendon, the covert PR company I mentioned in Wednesday’s post that conducts information operations for the US government and military. PRwatch.org gives a good backgrounder.
Apart from running a network of stringers such as Paul Moran, these are the guys that deliver little US flags by the thousands for the spontaneous shows of support the US likes to receive in foreign lands:
“If any of you either participated in the liberation of Kuwait City ... or if you watched it on television, you would have seen hundreds of Kuwaitis waving small American flags,” John Rendon said in his speech to the NSC. “Did you ever stop to wonder how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American flags? And for that matter, the flags of other coalition countries? Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs.”
I’m not sure if they choreographed the “spontaneous” celebrations in Iraq at the end of Gulf War II, but I’ll keep you posted. There’s a documentary on that here next week.
They are also the geniuses that came up with the name for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress and channeled millions to it in covert funding, according to the ABC.
While at tompaine.com we hear “a well-informed source who has worked with Rendon said it went beyond wooing foreign journalists to setting up disguised-source, pro-U.S. Web sites in several foreign languages and blast-faxing foreign media and search engines with pro-U.S. information.”
Rendon was supposed to be the company behind a media disinformation campaign earlier this year until even the seemingly shameless Bush administration was embarrassed by the plan breaking in the NY Times. According to that February report: “The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries.”
The office was closed as a result of the leak, but we may never know what happened to the campaign. Hold on, there could be one way to find out: editorial budgets in the Murdoch press would have blown out totally if it was cancelled.
There’s good info here too, and links at the end.
Meanwhile, here’s a dose of Middle East reality, the kinds of attitudes the US is trying to reverse with its highly ethical information programmes:
“The United States lost the public relations war in the Muslim world a long time ago,” says Osama Siblani, publisher of the Arab American News. “They could have the prophet Muhammad doing public relations and it wouldn't help.”
Fools like MacPundit lap up spin from Rendon and their ilk as if it is gospel. And then they are affronted when others don't. They gripe and whine when real reporters like Gilligan get out there, meet sources, ask hard questions, put their arses on the line, and bring us the truth.