The military plan to ‘clandestinely’ put bloggers on the payroll

For quite a while, the debate over blogs in the Defense Department was over whether U.S. troops should be allowed to have them at all. On the one hand, some officials were concerned about security breaches, with troops inadvertently sharing compromising information online. On the other, some saw blogs as a morale-boosting outlet for the troops.

But as Noah Shachtman explained in an interesting report yesterday, a study was written for U.S. Special Operations Command that took an entirely different approach to online communication, which included the suggestion of possibly “clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers.”

“Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning…. Denning, a professor at Naval Postgraduate School, adds in an e-mail, “I got some positive feedback from people who read the article, but I don’t know if it led to anything.” The report introduces the military audience to the “blogging phenomenon,” and lays out a number of ways in which the armed forces — specifically, the military’s public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations units — might use the sites to their advantage.

The Kinniburgh/Denning report was quite provocative, suggesting paying prominent bloggers to address “entrenched inequalities,” presumably in the media. The study did, however, note the downsides of such a plan: “People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.”

Now, it’s worth emphasizing that there’s no apparent evidence that the Pentagon actually put any prominent bloggers on the payroll. A spokesperson for U.S. Special Operations Command told Shachtman that the Kinniburgh/Denning report was merely an academic exercise: “The comments are not ‘actionable’, merely thought provoking.” As far as I know, prominent bloggers who toe the administration’s line on Iraq policy are doing so for ideological reasons, not financial ones.

But having said all of that, is it really that surprising officials would consider a proposal to put bloggers on the Pentagon’s payroll?



Sure, it’s offensive on a certain level to imagine the Defense Department using our tax dollars to co-opt bloggers for propaganda purposes. But given the Bush administration’s track record, I’d almost be surprised if officials didn’t consider a proposal to put bloggers on the Pentagon’s payroll.

After all, the administration’s track record is quite breathtaking. We’ve seen propagandistic efforts over…

Titled “The Sands Are Blowing Toward a Democratic Iraq,” an article written this week for publication in the Iraqi press was scornful of outsiders’ pessimism about the country’s future. “Western press and frequently those self-styled ‘objective’ observers of Iraq are often critics of how we, the people of Iraq, are proceeding down the path in determining what is best for our nation,” the article began. Quoting the Prophet Muhammad, it pleaded for unity and nonviolence. But far from being the heartfelt opinion of an Iraqi writer, as its language implied, the article was prepared by the United States military as part of a multimillion-dollar covert campaign to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media and pay friendly Iraqi journalists monthly stipends, military contractors and officials said.

…and over…

Federal investigators probing the Education Department’s public relations contracts have found a pattern of deals in which advocacy organizations received grants totaling nearly $4.7 million to promote Bush administration education priorities in newspaper columns and brochures, but didn’t disclose that they received taxpayer funds, as required by law.

…and over again.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production. This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration’s efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

The Pentagon considered a plan to pay bloggers to get the administration’s message out? Of course it did.