The U.S. Army has hired public relations firm Manning Selvage & Lee to do outreach to pro-military bloggers, according to a Jan. 10 article in trade publication O'Dwyer's Public Relations News.
"The blogs are viewed as a way to distribute 'good news' about Iraq," the managing director of the firm's Detroit office told O'Dwyer's.
Blogger Donald Sensing accepted the offer, saying, "I spent long enough in Army Public Affairs to know when I'm being fed baloney. ... I predict the [Washington] Post and others of the dinosaur media will ... say we are biased, as if they are not. ... I am biased, I freely admit."
The effort coincides with news that the Pentagon is shutting down some military blogs that it says reveal too much information about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. As reported by JABBS and others, the Pentagon's action has drawn criticism from soldiers and others who say the military's real goal is to silence or sanitize blogs that reveal the truth about daily life fighting the wars.
"The ones that stay up are completely patriotic and innocuous, and they're fine if you want to read the flag-waving and how everything's peachy keen in Iraq," New York Army National Guard Spc. Jason Christopher Hartley, who was demoted from sergeant and fined because of information on his blog, told Newsday.
The military's reasoning is "loose lips sink ships," and no doubt the military works under rules that the average American does not. But while the military worries about what messages are being sent by its soldiers' blogs, it should also consider what message it sends when it advocates censorship and propaganda.
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This item first appeared at Journalists Against Bush's B.S.
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