meria heller
Taxpayer dollars supporting the Pentagon media - unbelievabl
Thu Jun 26 01:02:26 2003
208.152.73.47

----- Original Message -----
From: meriaheller@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 12:59 PM
Subject: Taxpayer dollars supporting the Pentagon media - unbelievable!


Essentially, the Pentagon admits it funded the entire "embedded journalist"
propaganda circus, to the detriment of journalistic codes of ethics about not
taking money from sources. This is yet another display of how the media has
KNOWINGLY allowed itself to be totally manipulated - in essence, accepting the
defacement of the last shreds of objectivity it could lay claim to. Even worse,
at the end of the day, the same media rewards the manipulators with glowing
profiles. Ari Fleischer is known as a stonewalling equivocator, yet his
resignation is met with a glowing profile. Torie Clarke is the author and orchestrator
of the embedded phenomenon - a phenomenon now clearly shown to be nothing
more than a dressed up taxpayer-funded pay-for-play propaganda tool. When she
resigns, voila - she too receives glowing goodbye stories about her tenure.At
what point will the media wake up and stop writing stories about how well the
Bush Administration manipulates them and starts writing the real story about how
the Administration is arrogantly deceiving the country on every issue from
taxes to war? http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/072003/pressroom.html

FREE RIDE

To prepare for duty as embedded journalists during the war in Iraq, Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel reporters Katherine Skiba and Nahal Toosi received thousands
of dollars worth of combat training at media boot camps. After meeting her
assigned unit, Skiba later flew to Kuwait on a chartered Northwest Airlines jet
full of soldiers. Toosi, joining her unit in the Kuwaiti desert, donned an
imposing military gas mask during gas and Scud missile drills.

Who paid for this media training, transportation and equipment? Unwittingly,
American taxpayers picked up the tab for these and many other expenses in the
military's embedded media program.

"That's one way of looking at it," concedes Maj. Tim Blair, Pentagon officer
in charge of the program. Another way of looking at it is the embedded media,
by accepting military handouts at taxpayer expense, betrayed the public's
trust and venerable journalism policies against freebies.

These hidden costs of the program have gone curiously unreported, perhaps
because the top news organizations accepted this bargain for their own embedded
employees. Or maybe it's because the Pentagon didn't disclose any media
expenses in its $60 billion war budget. Either way, taxpayers had no reason to
suspect they would foot the bill when the Pentagon recruited 775 embedded
journalists to tell the military's story. For critics who already feared embeds were too
beholden to report objectively, this sweetheart deal will likely cast further
doubt. The bottom line is that Pentagon officials, to attract as many
journalists as possible, offered free training, transportation, food, shelter,
medical care, protection, gas masks and chemical suits, Blair tells Milwaukee
Magazine.

"The military is paying for these guys," says Blair. "We went into this
program saying we weren't going to have reimbursement." In effect, the Pentagon
offered free trips to Baghdad and hundreds of journalists jumped on board without
packing their ethics codes.

Almost every major news organization has a strict policy against journalists
accepting anything free from people they cover. Freebies undercut the public's
perception of their independence and objectivity. "We pay our own way. If an
event is newsworthy, we can afford it," states the Journal Sentinel's detailed
policy, which directly addresses meals, lodging, services, transportation and
other expenses. For instance: "The Journal Sentinel will pay for
transportation necessary for a staff member's professional duties in all possible cases,
including transportation provided by government or military agencies."

The military did require embeds to pay for their reporting equipment
(satellite phones or laptops) and for optional things like immunizations, helmets or
body armor. This is pocket change, however, compared to expenses for a
non-embedded reporter - $16,000 to $35,000 for everything from tents to gas masks to
hiring drivers, estimates a Columbia Journalism Review story.

While news editors and producers boast about how much they spent on Iraq
coverage, the more important issue is how much embeds saved by taking military
favors. In future military conflicts, will this many journalists embed if they
have to pay?

During media boot camps, for example, the Journal Sentinel's Skiba spent six
days at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Toosi five days at Quantico, Virginia. The
Pentagon's Lt. Col. Gary Keck, who coordinated the camps, says the training is
worth "thousands and thousands of dollars." By comparison, the private firm
Centurion Risk Assessment Services offers a similar five-day course for $2,300
per person, according to The Weekly Standard.

If embeds traveled with their units to the Gulf region, the trip was free.
Skiba hitched a ride with soldiers on a chartered Boeing B-747; a similar
commercial flight from Chicago to Kuwait City has a $1,400 ticket price.

To provide a minimum daily ration of two meals-ready-to-eat (MREs) and two
16-ounce bottles of sterilized water for a month, the cost to the military is
more than $500 per journalist, based on figures from the Defense Supply Center
in Philadelphia.

Free shelter saved embeds the cost of a tent ($130 retail), sleeping bag
($100 retail) or hotels in Kuwait City and Baghdad ($100 nightly minimum). They
also took no-cost loans of gas masks ($179-$329 retail) and
nuclear/biological/chemical suits ($45-$59 retail).

And, yes, protection courtesy of the U.S. armed forces. To hire a former
British Royal Marine from Centurion to escort you to Baghdad, the charge is around
$400 a day.

Embeds kicked out of their units for rules violations were then responsible
for themselves, a powerful incentive to play along.

Media analysts say journalists should have insisted on paying a fair-market
price for as many expenses as possible. After all, reimbursement could have
potentially netted the military - and taxpayers - more than $1 million.

"It's as much a matter of principle as it is tax dollars," says Philip Seib,
Nieman Professor of Journalism at Marquette University. "In fact, as a
taxpayer, I resent it. News organizations can afford it."

"Journalists seem to be failing to practice what they preach. They're
outraged when government officials accept travel and gifts from private interests,"
says Jeffery A. Smith, author of War and Press Freedom and a UW-Milwaukee
journalism professor. "Clearly, the news media have some explaining to do."

Journal Sentinel Editor Marty Kaiser did not respond to interview requests
for this story.

Milwaukee Magazine asked Blair if the Journal Sentinel or any other embedded
news organization insisted on paying more than the military required. Blair:
"Not to my knowledge."

David J. Sirota
Communications Director
U.S. House Appropriations Committee - Minority
Rep. David Obey, Ranking Member
(202) 225-3481