UPDATED - ColdType

Mugger mugs TV coverage, too
EVEN Taibbi’s conservative NY Pressmate Russ
Smith, aka “Mugger,” a longtime Bush Booster,
sees the pro-war TV coverage as over the top:
“Maybe you saw the March 28 Pew Research
Center poll showing 42 percent of Americans are
suffering from “war fatigue” by watching too
much television about the rapidly unfolding
events in Iraq. In addition, 58 percent find the
coverage “frightening.” Nevertheless, an overwhelming
majority of those surveyed by Fox
News claim they tune in at least two hours daily,
a certain sign of masochism that one hopes will
abate quickly.
“The media’s blitz of sensationalizing the Iraqi
invasion which obviously boosts ratings and sells
newspapers, even more than an abducted child
not unexpectedly and crosses ideological lines.
But with the exception of MSNBC’s Lester Holt,
I’ve lost all patience with the cable stations and
just can’t stomach the sight of Aaron Brown,
Shepard Smith, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Wolf
Blitzer, Bill O’Reilly, Larry King, and the hundreds
of retired generals and colonels who pop
off with conflicting analyses.”
Propaganda war misfires
EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
ONE of the leading analysts of war propaganda
posing as journalism, Philip Knightly (author of
“The First Casualty”) writes in The Guardian
today that the “coalition’s propaganda war is a
mess. Iraq is winning the propaganda war
against the coalition. The British government
admits it. David Blunkett, the home secretary,
says we are regarded as the villains. The government’s
spin specialist Alastair Campbell has
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called for a media shake-up, and in Kuwait the
coalition’s Psychological Operations Tactical
Group for Special Ground Forces Command
(Psyops) is working on an emergency plan to
regain the propaganda initiative.
“Everything has gone wrong on the propaganda
front. The widespread coverage of the
deaths of British servicemen at the hands of
their US allies, the shooting by US troops of Iraqi
women and children, horrific TV footage from al-
Jazeera of Iraqi civilians killed in bombing raids
on Baghdad, the contradictory statements from
the military briefers, and the failure of Iraqis to
turn out to welcome their ‘liberators.’”
But the most devastating assessment of the
coalition’s propaganda failure came in a recent
Russian-intercepted secret Psyops report analyzing
the effectiveness of the coalition’s campaign
to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis.
Using Iraqi TV broadcasts, intercepted radio
communications, interrogations of Iraqi POWs
and summaries of British and US media coverage,
Psyops concluded that Iraqis were more stable
and confident than they were in the last days
before the war. The report said that the coalition
had little time to change this attitude before what
Psyops people call “a resistance ideology” developed,
making an eventual coalition victory even
more difficult. You have to read this one.
Media worries
MORE controls are being imposed on the embedded
reporters. PR Week reports that the Pentagon
is embedding staffers among the embeds:
“They may not get as much attention as their
media counterparts, but dozens of Pentagon
public affairs officers are ‘embedded’ right