The Pentagon’s Implausible Deniability
Smear campaigns are now endemic to our twittering world of 24-hour news cycles.
Not smear campaigns by the media, but smear campaigns against the media. Or, at least, the few intrepid reporters still trying to dig deep into stories and come up with something resembling truth. (For a real eye opener read, Into the Buzzsaw, a stark exposé of the myth of a free press.)
This week we have a stunning and instructive case in point. This time it’s not a corporation targeting a reporter with a negative public relations campaign. No, this time it’s the Pentagon’s propagandists turning their massive messaging machine on the very reporters who dared to criticize it.
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What happened next is all too familiar to any reporter who has tried to investigate public or corporate malfeasance, or any suspected abuse of power. Almost immediately, Vanden Brook and Locker were victimized by a variety of scurrilous online attacks. The plot got thick—very quickly. In what would’ve once been thought to be an ironic twist, but today is just “business as usual,” the reporters became the targets of the very sort of propaganda they reported on in the first place.
Suddenly, fake websites were opened in their names. (with inaccurate reports they never wrote.) Twitter accounts and message forums posted lies in transparent attempts to discredit them. Potentially career damaging Wikipedia entries were posted.
more
http://blog.sfgate.com/griffith/2012/04/21/the-pentagon’s-implausible-deniability/
Our taxpayer dollars at work!