Weekend Book Club

Thanks, Joe. I'm a big fan of Martha's.

Joe Klein - Since you never followed up on your previous thread and have not responded to comments I am going to repeat a couple of questions:

We have already discussed why any form of military attack against Iran would be disasterous to America so let's take the assumption that the administration knows this and that they have decided to inject this issue (via Adam Nagourney) into the punditocracy. Then the question for Joe Klein becomes: Why do you think that they have decided to jerk your chain in this manner? From what do you think they are trying to distract you?

And finally, how many of your military and intelligence sources were on the Pentagon's psy/ops list? Given the type of manipulation described in the NYT article on the subject, do you suspect that there is a similar program in place to funnel false information to prominent pundits? Does this revelation cause you to be less credulous of your sources than you have been in the past? The entire episode raises the possibility that you are merely the final vector in the delivery of the Pentagon's propaganda virus and I honestly believe that you do not want that to be the case.

Anne Garrels Naked in Baghdad, while not a battlefield account, is also quite good.

Joe - Thanks for the plug for Martha - she's an insightful and compassionate journalist, who doesn't get enough credit, I think, for being the fine war correspondent she is.

There's a great interview with her on this book in Charlie Rose's archives - and a C-span interview as well, both from when the book came out - so I'm guessing a year or so ago.

I'm reading Rick Perlstein's new book. (It's not about himself though, it's about Richard Nixon and the kind of politics he invented.) Why did the "liberal" New York Times give it to George Will to review, I wonder? His review consists of a bunch of odd little details, rather than taking on the whole book in any serious way... The New York Times has an annoying tendency to assign poorly-chosen reviewers to progressive writers--their own Paul Krugman, for instance.

Blame Sam Tannenhaus, JJ.

BTW, Rick posted a comment somewhere where he agreed with Will that calling the ARVN "a joke" was in poor taste, but that he has photos of a tank at Kent State.

He's going to be on my interview show on the 29th.

I think the book, Nixonland, is fantastic. It's gonna be hard to keep the discussion to an hour.

Blame Sam Tannenhaus, JJ.

That's right-- that's the editor that Jim Sleeper sometimes takes on at TPM Cafe:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/10/10/the_cloud_over_sams_book_club/

I will throw it open for the thread to discuss.

Who here believes that the Pentagon engages in a program to feed information to prominent pundits in a manner similar to the newly disclosed psyops program that targetted television news programs?

Of course, it is very likely that Joe Klein's sources include many of the retired generals mentioned in the NYT article - the ones who spread disinformation to United States citizens over the public airwaves. And there is no reason to expect them to be more truthful to Joe Klein than they were on the air. So what about Klein's other sources? I am not asking him to name them, rather I am requesting that he engage us in a short discussion about how he views the information being fed to him in light of the recent verification of a program that many of us have suspected for a very long time. I realize that one must trust somebody in order to form an opinion so lets talk about how that trust is established.

We are going to be faced with another war funding bill debate and Joe Klein is going to be relying on his sources for information about the state of security in Iraq. So this is a very relevant discussion to have right now before things become overly heated. Since Klein is not responding to comments very much I am hoping that we talk about it here.

Who here believes that the Pentagon engages in a program to feed information to prominent pundits in a manner similar to the newly disclosed psyops program that targetted television news programs?

I'd be surprised if they didn't. This from Glenn Greenwald's post yesterday, drawing from an internal Pentagon email obtained through FOIA (one of the sources of the NYT story):

RECOMMENDATION

1.) I recommend we develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become part of a "hot list" of those that we immediately make calls to or put on an email distro list before we contact or respond to media on hot issues. We can also do more proactive engagement with this list and give them tips on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on issues as they are developing. By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . .

3.) Media ops and outreach can work on a plan to maximize use of the analysts and figure out a system by which we keep our most reliably friendly analysts plugged in on everything from crisis response to future plans. This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter and the more they know, the more valuable they are to the networks. . . .

5.) As evidenced by this analyst trip to Iraq, the synergy of outreach shops and media ops working together on these types of projects is enormous and effective. Will continue to exam (sic) ways to improve processes.

And this is from a post by Jay Rosen offering analysis of why editorial writers really never took the anti-war position seriously:

I would begin with the division that counts the most for editorial writers, which is between people in the know and people in the dark. The people in the know... well, they know much. To put it in a single image, they've read the cables. The people in the dark don't know ; they just read the papers! Editorial writing is the art of explaining what the people in the know think to the people in the dark, but with a little twist of argument or finely connected bit of fact that shows that the editorial writer, too, is a person in the know. Maybe he talked to the guy who read the cables.

Under no circumstances does a writer in this style identify with the people out there who are in the dark, protesting something they are not a part of, and don't know much about. The people in the dark need to be led to a judicious stand. That's why a newspaper editorial is sometimes called a leader. The echo is still there in some newspaper names: The Lexington Herald-Leader, the News-Leader of Springfield, Mo.

So while it's true that public opinion turned against the war and in favor of withdrawal, elite opinion did not. To be a "leader" is not to be ahead of public opinion, but to be more sophisticated than it. This is why Atrios, Matt Yglesias and other acerbic bloggers on the left are constantly making fun of what "very serious" people in Washington and the press say; it is an apt term for how they present themselves.

So I would bet if you want to be a "Very Serious Person" who gets to "talk to the guy who read the cables," by definition, you can't talk too much against the party line. That will bump you off the "Very Serious Person" list and as a "less reliably friendly analyst," you will be "weeded out... by the networks."

Joe:
"Books by TV journalists range from the charming to the useless"

As opposed to books to written by journalists in the print media?

I would add that when an opinion writer does this it isn't quite as bad as what the Pentagon did--which was to pass the public propaganda under the guise of expertise (essentially using taxpayer money allotted to the Pentagon to fool the same public that was paying its taxes). This kind of thing was outright deceit, and illegal as I understand it.

But we still have a right to be peeved about journalistic malpractice--that a "liberal" columnist would allow himself to "carry water" this way. This is another instance of what Walter Pincus was talking about when he said the press was "increasingly becom[ing] common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance and at times even accuracy" (and making specific reference to the Pentagon when he was saying this too).

Joe,

When is Time mag going to cover the illegal psy-ops carried out by the Pentagon against US citizens?

J.J. - Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen have been excellent sources of information on this story. And by 'sources' I do not mean a person 'that we can count on to carry our water.' It is unsettling how the Pentagon is able to describe the dangers of 'access journalism' with such precision. What is most unsettling is that they did not consider it to be a danger but instead an opportunity.

I do not want Joe Klein to think that I am picking on him alone - I would like for every journalist/columnist to address this issue. And I think that every producer owes it to their readers/viewers to explain the process used to select the analysts that they placed on the air.

But if there is anything that Joe Klein has been most proud of it is his personal network of military and intelligence sources. He is a special case and I think that this forum is the perfect place to hold this type of discussion. For my part, I am willing to limit my questions to the realm of 'process' and not try to turn this into a grand narrative of his manipulation at the hands of Pentagon psyops agents. Or at least try.

Ms. Raddatz was on O'Reilly a while back and he had a lot of praise for her book and recommended that everyone read it.