CURSE YOU, BLOGGERS!

Armchair Generalist went for­ag­ing through the University of Bradford non-​​lethal weapons report I men­tioned yes­ter­day, and found him­self a lit­tle chest­nut from the Pentagon’s PR department…

Over lunch on the first day of the con­fer­ence a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defence for Public Affairs dis­cussed strate­gies to coun­ter­act crit­i­cal view­points of the non-​​lethal weapons pro­gramme in the media. She encour­aged those present to keep repeat­ing a pos­i­tive mes­sage par­tic­u­larly when there was a neg­a­tive story pub­lished, and not to shy away from com­ment­ing. If there was neg­a­tive cov­er­age about an impor­tant pro­gramme that could be derailed by the gen­eral pub­lic or con­gress then they would really go after them, she said. She indi­cated that offi­cials would give increased infor­ma­tion access to bread and but­ter mil­i­tary jour­nal­ists as opposed to the 60 min­utes type jour­nal­ists in return for more pos­i­tive cov­er­age. She also advo­cated a strat­egy of tar­get­ing mil­i­tary ana­lysts work­ing for var­i­ous news media and get­ting them on mes­sage. She admit­ted, how­ever, that they still dont know how to han­dle the blog­gers. (empha­sis mine)

May 4th, 2005 | Blog Bidness | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.