Barry's Bonds

This past weekend's On The Media featured a piece on retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who frequently appears on NBC, billed as a "military analyst." I've touched on this story previously (links below), calling attention to fine exposé work done by David Barstow of The New York Times. If that doesn't ring a bell, here's a short recap: McCaffrey has extensive financial ties to various defense contractors. NBC never makes these conflicts of interest known when McCaffrey appears. Both McCaffrey and NBC have dismissed Barstow's reporting, and have argued that because McCaffrey has in the past been critical of the conduct of the war in Iraq, and because he's a self-described war hero who's been wounded, he is therefore above reproach.

Here's the OTM piece, an interview by Bob Garfield of the Columbia Journalism Review's Charles Kaiser, who has been covering this story. It's about eight minutes long. The first forty seconds are the usual NPR promo and sponsorship messages.

If the embedded audio player doesn't work for you, you can visit the article page on OTM's site and download an MP3 audio file. A transcript should also be available soon on that same page -- I think OTM usually gets them up by Tuesday.

I'm delighted to see that this story is continuing to get some attention, at least, and that Barstow's investigative work was not for nothing.

Further reading:

• My 19 April 2008 post linking to Barstow's first story, which described the overall problem of retired generals working as TV analysts, their conflicts of interest, and their connections to the Pentagon's propaganda machine.
  
  
• My 30 November 2008 post linking to Barstow's second story, which focused on McCaffrey and NBC.
  
  
• My 2 December 2008 post following up on the 30 November one, linking to Glenn Greenwald's post on Salon and offering several other links, including one to an article by Charles Kaiser, the CJRer interviewed by OTM.
  
  
• McCaffrey's business web site, which at the moment has a statement on the home page responding to Barstow's more recent story. This statement makes for interesting reading in what it does and does not say.

The entire OTM show for this week is available here. As always, well worth listening to.

Follow-up on Barstow's Exposé of McCaffrey

Glenn Greenwald has a lengthy post up on Salon that builds on David Barstow's story that I noted on Sunday. Glenn focuses more on NBC's despicable behavior, and his piece is heavily documented with many useful links.

[Added] Glenn has another post on this topic, "NBC and McCaffrey's coordinated responses to the NYT story." The degree to which McCaffrey and NBC are going to spin this is nothing short of amazing. Perhaps this is a sign of hope -- ideally, we'd like NBC to come clean about its past and change their policies, but at least they're bothered enough at this point not to just ignore the matter. I'd like to see more attention paid to this than, say, obsessing over what Obama's appointments might mean.

[Added] Note especially the posts on Politico and the Columbia Journalism Review that Glenn links to. I also want to second Glenn's shoutout to Benaim, Motaparthy, and Kumar's piece in The Nation, which exposed McCaffrey's extensive ties to military contractors in 2003. You remember how much attention that got, right? Not.

McCaffrey: Gotta Get Paid

David Barstow has a long investigative piece profiling Barry McCaffrey in yesterday's NY Times: "One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex."

The piece is in some ways so distressing that after I read it yesterday morning, I couldn't think of anything to say after copying and pasting the URL. I still don't have much to offer beyond thinking that it's required reading for anyone who wants a glimpse at how things too often work when it comes to "informing the public."

Barstow's piece recalls another one of his that I noted back in April, which looked at the problem of retired generals on TV and their undisclosed conflicts of interest as a widespread phenomenon. This new one concentrates on the guy who I guess could be called the epitome since I don't think many people would be happy if I just called him the biggest scumbag of them all.

The problem is, it appears that McCaffery (and the other retired generals) don't seem to have broken any laws. I suppose one could argue that they were accomplices in conducting psywar or at least propagandizing their own fellow citizens. McCaffrey would like to claim he was a critic, not a cheerleader, and I'll grant that he was less consistently onerous in this regard than some of the others -- he seems to have been more motivated by making money than in snowing the public about how swimmingly things were going in Iraq.

The media outlets who have these guys on are also due a lot of chastising. I found Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, to be just as distasteful as McCaffrey in his refusal to acknowledge how wrong it is for his organization not to have found out or disclosed the conflicts of interests.

Barstow's article brought to mind so many other things that depress me about my country -- how bloated the defense budget is, how well-greased the revolving door between government service and the private sector is, how naively reverent we are of those in uniform, how profit-driven and ethics-free the TV news biz has become now that they're just subsidiaries of giant corporate conglomerates … ahhh, this isn't doing much to encourage you to read the article, is it?

Forget what I said. Just go read it. And don't miss the many sidebar features, particularly the narrated slideshow that Barstow assembled back in April to accompany his earlier piece (direct link).

Shoutout to Barstow for the work he put in and the details he dug up. Long live real newspapers and real reporters.

(pic. source)

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Ryan Tate at Gawker notes the piece, too. He makes a point that occurred to me, too: just as with the April article, there's the feeling that Barstow's efforts will likely be for naught. Not enough people will feel the same amount of outrage as we do, and in any case, how are we poor slobs going to effect change on this whole rotten system?