NYT: How Pentagon managed the media

As a sign that investigative journalism is not dead yet, the New York Times published an in-depth investigation on how the Pentagon used analysts and commentators to influence public perception of the Iraq invasion. It shows massive failures on the part of the news media as a whole (New York Times itself published several op-ed articles by these “objective” commentators). The failing is not so much that these analysts were allowed to be on air, but that they were presented as objective military commentators, not people who received secretly briefings from the Pentagon, not to mention their links with contractors, who were directly benefitting from the war.