More on Astroturf Analysts

Josh wonders ...

As you know, on Sunday the Times published a blockbuster article detailing how the Pentagon has used a mix of control of access, defense contracts and more to get network "military analysts" to spout Pentagon talking points in their on-camera analysis. In some cases they even appear to have gotten the analysts to report back to them on what news stories the nets had coming down the pike.

Anybody notice any of the networks -- broadcast or cable -- picking up the story?

Indeed, the silence heard on the matter is stunning. And it shows another angle of how the myth of a liberal media falls apart upon even cursory inspection. Barstow's report noted that several of the analysts were pressured to parrot talking points, in part because they savored the access to the Pentagon. Apparently that goes in another direction ... the media outlets themselves savor the inside info from the Pentagon as well. To lose access is to have an inferior "news" show compared to the outlet that uses analysts with better spoon-feeding capabilities.

Of course, there's also the "whole can of worms" approach to view this issue. It's not just the Pentagon-to-analyst talking points industry that risks getting unraveled. It's every industry that has lobbyists spoon-feeding their talking points to the media for predominantly government clients. Kinda like the Houston Chronicle did with a Douglas MacKinnon op-ed (no longer online, so here's a cache of it). To the untrained eye, you might not know that MacKinnon's plea for a bigger NASA budget is coming from someone who's firm lobbies for Raytheon ... a NASA contractor. It might be fine if that were disclosed. But it wasn't. So maybe that's why many in the media are a bit slow to pick up the charge on astroturf opinion leaders.