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War, War, War See other War, War, War Articles Title: Campos: Analyst for hire Click for Full Text! Upton Sinclair once remarked that it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. This observation is borne out by the reactions of Barry McCaffrey to the extraordinarily damning revelations contained in a very long front-page New York Times story regarding McCaffrey's role as a military analyst for NBC. The story, which is remarkably detailed and well-sourced, really has to be read in its entirety. The gist of it is that McCaffrey, a retired general, has spent the last few years getting paid a whole lot of money by defense contractors to go on TV and shill for their products, while giving his audience the impression that he's providing them with a disinterested analysis of what the U.S. military ought to be doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. McCaffrey, in short, is a very well-compensated player in the immensely profitable game of dividing up the hundreds of billions of tax dollars we stuff into the rapacious maw of our military industrial complex. (As another Times story detailed back in April, the Pentagon actually had a whole program, since shut down, to provide supposedly "independent" retired military personnel, including McCaffrey, with administration talking points for the purpose of selling - quite literally - the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.) Here is how the game is played: Current defense contractors, and companies that hope to get a piece of the multibillion-dollar tax dollar action, hire retired generals to use their influence and connections to push their products on TV, in the guise of doing "analysis." In addition, someone like McCaffrey, who is particularly well-connected with the military establishment, can and does get special access to key decision-makers in the Pentagon, allowing him to lobby for his corporate clients even more effectively. This access in turn helps amplify McCaffrey's media "platform," which then further benefits his value as a lobbyist. (This is what is called "positive synergy" in our business schools, and "getting over" in the argot of inner-city drug dealers.) But none of this has ever been disclosed to NBC's viewers, to whom McCaffrey continues to be presented as a disinterested analyst rather than a particularly well-connected corporate shill. And what is McCaffrey's reaction to the revelation of his - shall we say - complex relationship to his journalistic subject matter? He is deeply shocked that anyone could possibly imagine that anything he says on TV could be motivated by anything other than pure patriotism, and his dedication to the task of helping America spread Freedom(Trademark) throughout the world. NBC, it appears, takes a similar view (although they, like the other television networks, have now managed to go for seven months without even mentioning the earlier Times story - a story which seemed to demonstrate that the networks are violating the most basic norms of journalistic integrity by failing to disclose the egregious conflicts of interest besetting people like McCaffrey). This attitude is warranted if one believes that - in one of those remarkable coincidences that seem to occur only at the highest echelons of political, economic and social power - the financial interests of McCaffrey are precisely the same as the interests of the American taxpayer (not to mention the people of Afghanistan and Iraq). That of course is possible - but the first rule of journalism is that the audience should be given the information it needs to make up its own mind about such matters. In the days ahead, I will be curious to see how people like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow - liberal administration gadflies who host news programs on the NBC family of networks - cover this story. Olbermann in particular has spent the last couple of years consciously echoing the style of such giants of journalism as Edward R. Murrow. He should consider what Murrow would have to say about this sort of thing. Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.
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