Army Psyops Setting CNN Editorial Policy?

The U.S. Army had Psychological Operations ("psyops") personnel "interning" at CNN during the Kosovo "humanitarian intervention," according to a chilling story reported by the inimitable Alexander Cockburn in the most recent issue of Counter Punch. And, further, these military personnel in all likelihood helped prepare news stories; this makes Christiane Amanpour's coverage of Kosovo (she's married to James Rubin, State Dep't spokesman) only the second most disgusting recent display of CNN's shoddy standards and practices. I rarely invoke "slippery slope" arguments, but this is a case where it's obvious that blurring the lines between the military and free press will lead step by step to increasingly bad, that is, unfree, undemocratic things. It's yet another example of why "free press" and "media business" aren't the same thing -- why the former is a prerequisite to robust democracy, and the latter inimical to it.

Cockburn follows up with a more detailed look at the situation.

CNN is up in arms about our report in the last issue of CounterPunch concerning the findings of a Dutch journalist, Abe de Vries about the presence of US Army personnel at CNN, owned by Time-Warner ... De Vries reported that a handful of military personnel from the Third Psychological Operations Battalion, part of the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, had worked in CNN's hq in Atlanta.

De Vries quoted Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service as having confirmed the presence of these Army psyops experts at CNN, saying, "Psyops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta ... They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news."

"The facts are", de Vries told me, "that the US Army, US Special Operations Command and CNN personnel confirmed to me that military personnel have been involved in news production at CNN's newsdesks. I found it simply astonishing. Of course CNN says these psyops personnel didn't decide anything, write news reports, etcetera. What else can they say? Maybe it's true, maybe not. The point is that these kind of close ties with the army are, in my view, completely unacceptable for any serious news organization. Maybe even more astonishing is the complete silence about the story from the big media...

In the first two weeks of the war in Kosovo CNN produced thirty articles for the Internet, according to de Vries, who looked them up for his first story. An average CNN article had seven mentions of Tony Blair, NATO spokesmen like Jamie Shea and David Wilby or other NATO officials. Words like refugees, ethnic cleansing, mass killings and expulsions were used nine times on the average. But the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (0.2 mentions) and the Yugoslav civilian victims (0.3 mentions) barely existed for CNN.

UPDATE -- Alexander Cockburn and Norman Solomon were on KPFA's Living Room show today talking about the further debasement of CNN, and other media, by close association with Army propagandists. What is psyops? Cockburn: "Military psyops is propaganda to influence public opinion domestically, but also to squelch opposing, dissenting points of view. The Army laments not having gotten close enough to a full 'cone of silence' in Serbia...Only a naive person would think that the U.S. government wouldn't, in a case like Kosovo, wouldn't be enormously attentive to the ways they could influence information about what happens there...The idea that somehow there is a distinterested thing called 'the mainstream media' is just a waste of time."

UPDATE -- FAIR's Counter Spin also covers the CNN-Army Propagandists connection by talking with Cockburn. It's worth a listen (available later today).

Correction -- Dan Hartung, of lake effect, a weblog, corrects my error: Amanpour's husband is a flak for the State Dep't, not for the Pentagon, as I previously wrote. Thanks to Dan for spotting by thinko. This also gave me a chance to look at Dan's site, and I recommend it. If you like some of Monkeyfist, you'll probably like lake effect too.