My two kids, both adult graduates of the Collins College of Rock ‘n’ Roll Knowledge (2C2RK), returned home for the holidays. We had a terrific time renewing family holiday rituals, which include fighting comas after overdosing on turkey, stuffing, dressing, and cranberry. It was wonderful. After one meal, I rummaged quickly through the books my daughter brought home to read, which included texts on physics, and radiology, and lingered over her other periodicals, such as Rolling Stone, where I inhaled the cover article headlined: Inside the secret campaign to sell the war. Wow. Secrets… Hmmm. Inside the mag, the article by James Bamford had a more restrained headline: Meet John Rendon, Bush’s general in the propaganda war. The man who sold the war. $100 million PR campaign hatched by a “shadowy beltway consulting firm”… The mag’s sensational, packaging of this “investigative” story had it all: secret agents, hidden agendas, slush funds for propaganda, millions in Beltaway consulting fees, top secret government task forces… Zowie!
Despite the build-up by the mag’s packagers, the article itself was more restrained, with all the carefully inserted lawyerly passive tenses, subjunctive moods and other fire escape phrasings that allude to dark skull duggery without saying it. It was a relatively superficial look-see at the mechanical process by which the government promotes ideas and policies in the modern world. The article is worth genuine study. (Editor's note: the best reading is the bitch fight between Rendon and reporter Bamford posted on the web at the bottom of the story.) Still, there was, in the tone and presentation of the information, a decidedly Casablanca moment at work here where the editors, like Captain Renault, told Rick he was ordering the saloon closed because he was “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here,” just as Rick's croupier hands the French cop his winnings. I mean, hell-oh! Where and how do reporters think ideas like liberating Iraq from Saddam get promoted?
Quillnews view: This somewhat breathless but useful profile reveals the work of just one of the multitudes of DC-based lobbying, image and communications packagers who are the architects of much of the content in public policy debates – on everything from import duties, farm subsidies, foreign aide, etc, to, yes, war. There are the professionals hired to do the operational communications work for clients willing to pay money to promote their ideas and accomplish their policy objectives. These communications, lobbying, PR, regulatory and legislative advisors are usually former campaign or Hill aides, committee staffers, or out of office former political appointees; a few are former members of Congress. Everybody in professional DC knows of this work, knows of its rules of engagement and processes and how these are the stage managers of the public debate shown on TV at night, reflected in the news and opinion columns and as study subjects by the scores of high tone think tanks. When former political appointees or operatives leave government to work in DC's private sector, this is the private sector they have in mind. In this case, Rendon did much of the incremental organizing work associated with building the public case for the overthrow of Saddam. Unlike what the Rolling Stone editors would have you believe, however, this was no secret. It was open, overt and the declared policy of the US government, under Clinton and Bush 43. This work was obvious in the professional ranks in DC and paid for by the US government under contracts through the CIA, DoD, State Department approved by the National Security Council, its various task forces and interdepartmental working groups associated with Iraq, and reviewed and acknowledged by members of Congress. My view is not that Rendon and his minions were doing nothing wrong at all, but that upon reading of their assignments and programs that they should have been way better at it, and that their government paymasters and managers should have approved much more of it! My question of the government executives and managers supervising Rendon is why they didn’t do more of this work, better, more efficiently, more ably, more completely and more effectively? The US government's management - at the highest executive levels - of the marketing of the liberation of Iraq has been awful. The facts of the Iraq war are what they are: they are a horror and there is no denying their devestating impact. But to let the jihadists, perverts, sociopaths, political malcontents and anti American political hacks of the world dominate the public agenda in the MSM and manipulate its processes for their purposes during wartime was preventable and has become nearly catastrophic! Furthermore, America’s devoted patriots and volunteers in defending freedom and liberating the oppressed have been denied the public notice, appreciation and honor their work and sacrifices deserve.
The fact that much of this government public relations activity went (and goes) undiscussed or unreported has many explanations. Under the standards of contemporary journalism in DC the role of these professional message managers and their paymasters remains hidden from the public. Why so many reporters and editors let this world manufacture its message products in secret and without acknowledgement has many reasons:
- Ignorance,
- Stupidity,
- Laziness,
- Willful innocence, and
- The competitive business demands of marketing a journalistic product for profit.
The first three reasons are easy enough; most journalists are too inexperienced and young to know better. The notion of willful innocence, however, goes more to the mind set of contemporary MSM journalists who insist they are independent, unbiased, honest brokers of information, and reporters who balance all points of view in presenting their news stories. This professional delusion is one of the reasons that so many ordinary people find the MSM so breathtakingly arrogant and obtuse in the face of the obvious facts of life so plain to others. And the fifth reason is more cynical – the work of background packagers of political messages are kept out of the lime light because to reveal their existence removes the “investigative” value (i.e. marketing power) of the reporter and the for-profit corporate MSM. In fact, that is why so much of today’s DC journalism is biased toward titlating scandal – where reporters obsess on finding the hidden and secret truth behind the news and in accordance with their arrogant assumption that the press is a valued member of the democratic process because it alone it selflessly able to reveal government lying, incompetent and otherwise untrustworthy and unworthy behavior and motives. (Editor’s aside: My view of this MSM journalistic assumption, such as the breathless tone taken by Rolling Stone in revealing an important communication function of democratic government, is that this current professional standard is a complete load… Stay tuned.) (RS story; Rendon response; Bamford response) Part 12
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