"Screening of war reporters stirs complaint" by Associated Press | August 27, 2009
BRUSSELS - The International Federation of Journalists complained yesterday that news people covering the war in Afghanistan are being monitored by the US military to see if they are sympathetic to the American cause.
How dare we criticize anyone?
The federation said journalists seeking to travel under the protection of US armed forces in Afghanistan may be screened first by an American public relations firm to see whether their coverage portrays the military in a positive light.
Related: The Tweeting Trolls of the U.S. Military
Memory Hole: Iraq, Lincoln and Propaganda
“This profiling of journalists further compromises the independence of media,’’ Aidan White, general secretary of the Brussels-based federation, said in a statement.
What independence? See: Operation Mockingbird
The complaint followed the publication Aug. 24 of an article in the Stars and Stripes, an independent daily covering the US military, reporting that embedded journalists were being screened by The Rendon Group, a Washington-based public relations company.
The article said the company “gained notoriety’’ before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq “for collaborating with the Iraqi National Congress,’’ an opposition group “reportedly funded by the CIA [that] furnished much of the false information about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion.’’
A US military spokeswoman in Kabul said the Rendon reports were used only to ascertain what a journalist’s specific interests might be....
Also see: Another Pentagon Propaganda Program in Afghanistan
