Endless Shameless

Charles Kaiser, "Above the Fold: Complex Analysis"

Is there any limit to the shamelessness of NBC News?

That is one of several questions sparked by David Barstow's 5,000-word assault against the military-industrial complex in general and "One Man's Military-Industrial-Media Complex" in particular—the one owned and operated by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

Barstow's piece, on the front page of yesterday's New York Times, appeared exactly six months after the same reporter's previous spectacular effort on this subject, five and a half years after The Nation's Daniel Benaim, Priyanka Motaparthy, & Vishesh Kumar first disclosed McCaffrey's very extensive ties to military contractors—and thirty-seven years after CBS News first identified military manipulation of the media in a documentary called The Selling of the Pentagon.

Barstow's earlier story revealed that the Pentagon had recruited an army of seventy-five retired military officer talking heads to appear as objective experts on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC—men who actually work with "more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants." The companies are "all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terror."

The networks reacted to that Times story with a stunning wall of silence. Neither CBS nor NBC nor ABC has ever mentioned it on any of their evening news broadcasts. (Glenn Greenwald noted yesterday that clocks had been created "to count the number of days the networks blackballed Barstow's story"; they now stand at "223 days, and counting.")