Wellsangels

Over at eyes on the prize, Irene wrote up a great post on the NYTimes Sunday expose of the Pentagon’s coordination of seemingly independent retired generals speaking as experts on the war in 2006. This story neatly marries the major concerns of both Lippmann and Habermas–government control of public information, and the corruption of the public sphere by hidden private interests. In terms of the former, as Irene points out, there are some painful similarities between the control of the generals’ messages by the Pentagon and the control of information in France in the first world war as described by Lippmann.

But the fact that the “analysts” were also economically interested in government policy (and thus public opinion) brings a Habermasian concern–and a perhaps even darker side–to this story. From the story’s first page:

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

And from later in the story, describing one analyst’s introduction to the Pentagon’s PR campaign:

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

The analysts were not only instruments of the Pentagon’s P.R. campaign–they were also privately-interested actors hiding their “business intentions in the role of someone interested in the public welfare” (Habermas, 1989, p. 193).