War and Public Opinion

Last October, in connection with the bad news about Blackwater coming out, I made the following remarks on Clio and Me:

One of President Bush’s mistakes was to go to war with only enough public support to begin it. There is no such thing as war on the cheap. Private contractors are expensive in mere dollars, but they have helped the administration to avoid seeking a more solid domestic political foundation for the war—or accepting the consequences if it is unable to do so.

I stand by those remarks, but a piece in Sunday’s New York Times points to more sophisticated Pentagon management of the media than I had believed possible. In “Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” David Barstow reports on the Pentagon’s active courtship of so-called independent military analysts on the major television news networks. The analysts were seduced not only by the flattering attention by the Pentagon and the fees paid by the media, but also by the financial opportunities that their access to the Pentagon provided because of their ties to companies seeking military contracts.

On my tumblelog I was only half-joking when earlier this evening I wrote:

One more reason to watch The News Hour on PBS instead. So what is this now? The military-industrial-media complex? Or is everything okay since this has been stage-managed by our duly elected president’s appointed cronies?

Of course, propaganda or “psyops” [psychological operations] will only get the administration and Pentagon so far.