• Markets
• Economy
• Federal Reserve
• Housing
• Energy
• Digital Media

Question Everything

Why so skeptical?

I hear that question way too often. The short answer is that after a few decades on Wall Street, you learn that when a lot of any money is at stake, people quite easily become completely and totally full of bullshit.

This is why I (to quote someone else) "consistently doubt everything, especially government and mainstream media, and asks questions that have readers asking their own questions."

The most egregious example in recent memory landed on the front page of the Sunday NYT:

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

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.

Go read the full article -- but not on a full stomach . . .

>

Source:
Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand   
DAVID BARSTOW    
NYT, April 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html

Sunday, April 20, 2008 | 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (52) | TrackBack (0)
add to de.li.cious | digg this! | add to technorati | email this post

Comments

Maybe I'm simply cyncical, but having lived with the Vietnam War daily "body counts", (how could we kill off enough North Vietnamese to depopulate that entire country and still lose the war?) I haven't believed anything that has come from the Pentagon since 1964.

Posted by: Winston Munn | Apr 20, 2008 7:59:57 PM