The Pentagon has begun using a contractor to rate the attitudes of potential embedded reporters, according to the partially-government-funded Stars & Stripes newspaper. "U.S. public affairs officials in Afghanistan acknowledged to Stars & Stripes that any reporter seeking to embed with U.S. forces is subject to a background profile by The Rendon Group," the paper reported Monday. Rendon reportedly ranks reporters’ stories as "positive," "negative" or "neutral" towards U.S. war aims.

The Pentagon denied that the ratings were used to screen embeds. Besides, the military stopped using the "positive," "negative" and "neutral" labels in October, according to Pentagon spokesman Brian Whitman. Now the Pentagon simply looks for accuracy in reporters' stories, said Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, a military media handler in Kabul. "It's so we know who we're working with," Mathias said.

Today Stars & Stripes fired back, quoting from leaked documents that show the military continues to use the "positive," "negative" and "neutral" system. "One of the profiles [in the leaked documents] evaluates work published as recently as May, indicating that the rating practice did not in fact cease last October as Whitman stated," the newspaper revealed.

Worse, the Rendon reports are being used to craft strategies for influencing journalists, according to Stars & Stripes. The paper quotes a Rendon report recommending the military steer a particularly "subjective" TV reporter towards "the positive work of a successful operation" in order to "result in favorable coverage."

Prof. Bob Zelnick, a former ABC military reporter now at Boston University, is worried about the prospect

of Pentagon media manipulation. "I don't think war can be covered in any significant way without an embedded component to the coverage," he told Danger Room. "That's the way every war was covered, from the Civil War right up to Vietnam."

He added that small media outlets – blogs, free weeklies, local papers – are more vulnerable to Pentagon screening than big, established outlets that can loudly protest any military manipulation. Still, Zelnick said, all media have the power to reverse any wrong-headed Pentagon press policies. "It seems to me, if reporters are being denied access, or if that access is severely controlled, I'd take it right to the top. I think current Secretary of Defense [Bob] Gates is sympathetic to fair coverage."

[PHOTO: MSNBC]

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