Sock Puppets
Missed this story while I was in Mexico:
"Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.
These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated. Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.""
You don't say. Now all we need is a hundred million more people (or two) to realize this same use of sock puppets extends across all industries, throughout all media and blogs...and that nearly the entire system of U.S. news is a disinformation and consumer jerk-off vacuum tasked with making old white gentlemen money.
The Pentagon's solution to the pesky problem of the press relaying truth? Either use sock puppets or create their own news channel. But military learned this from industry, and as I write this, people in marketing are successfully convincing the world of bloggers that no substantive dividing line between marketing and news is actually a good idea, and that financial conflicts of interests are no big deal when it comes to relaying information...
Again, if we took the advertising money out of news you'd start to fix these problems, but the old gentlemen would rather spend our tax dollars on war and Bear Stearns bailouts, not PBS.