Iraq and Media Update

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has been attacking the Iraq war policy. This is significant as this guy was a Bush loyalist, but has enough about him to see past his former boss. A couple of this he says is very significant about the media coverage of the war;

McClellan charges that Bush relied on 'propaganda' to sell the war.
He says the White House press corps was too easy on the administration during the run-up to the war.

But the mainstream media in the US is still using Pentagon placed mouthpieces pretending to be independent voices despite them being outed as such;

Brig. Gen. David L. Grange doesn't wear a star on his shoulder much since his retirement in 1999. But he's on the list of retired officers the Pentagon has cultivated in an effort to influence domestic news coverage of military matters....In fact, Grange, a CNN analyst, was tagged as the most visible shill for the Pentagon since 2002....When Grange appeared again on CNN late last week, host Lou Dobbs made no mention of Grange's previous participation in the Pentagon program...But a Pentagon memo called them "message force multipliers." The Defense Department often paid their travel expenses and hired a private defense contractor to monitor everything the analysts said in public.

This is why we need democratic media.
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