The Fear Industrial Complex: Mainstream Media Refuses to Disclose that "Independent" Pundits are Actually Lobbyists

[I'm going to break my rule and give a ton of links. Sorry if it's too much info at once] This video clip is from the BBC documentary The Century of the Self, and it explains how the media allows itself to be manipulated and used to further the ends of those in power. They did it 50 years ago. They did it to sell the war in Iraq. And they're doing it today. The lobbyists are people they tell us are people we have to trust. For instance, former DHS Sec. Michael Chertoff who's going to get his very own post in this series or former DNI Mike McConnell, who happens to have made a bundle out of security contracts at Booz Allen

Ten years after leaving the government, McConnell was finally making real money -- two million dollars a year at Booz-Allen.

At Booz Allen, McConnell helped develop a program designed to protect the global financial network. He and a team of veterans from the New York Stock Exchange and information-technology officers from major financial institutions put together a report that surveyed the system's vulnerabilities, and submitted it to the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection. "Our study, which was unclassified, was so compelling that they classified it!" McConnell says, laughing. McConnell's team eventually won nearly three hundred million dollars in government contracts for Booz Allen.

Not bad work if you can get it, huh? I'm pretty sure there are a ton more links in which McConnell says we need invasive domestic spying procedures and multiple weapon systems in place for us to stay safe from the scary boogymen. And he might have more credibility if he didn't go straight back into the waiting arms of Booz Allen

Which brings us back to the media and the NYTimes in particular. A few weeks ago there was an Op-Ed in the Times focused on by Glen Greenwald in which the author dismissed the uproar over killing more civilians in Afghanistan. Here, Glen explains that the Times disclosed that the author, Lara M. Dadkhah,

recently took a job at Booz Allen

More from Glen about Booz Allen and their ties to the Pentagon

The media not only accepts this pro-war propaganda -- they (MSNBC) silence the critics such as former Minn. Gov. Jesse Ventura

Well, the great example is myself. When I came out of office, I was the hottest commodity out there. I was the voice of the independent. CNN, MSNBC, and Fox got in a bidding war for me. MSNBC won. I went to do my show, they were putting together a five-day-a-week show for me, and then all of a sudden, a phone call came to one of my subordinates, and they said, "Is it true that the Governor doesn’t support the war in Iraq?" This was right before, as the Iraq war was going on, getting ready to hype up. And they said no. There was a deafening pause at the other end. They said, "Does New Jersey know about this?" And the person said, "I don’t know." And then they said, "Is there a chance he’d change his mind?" And this person that worked with me four years at the Capitol, he said, "I don’t think so." Because he said, the Governor’s pretty staunch when he gets, you know, you’d really have to sway him. And the war ain’t gonna sway him. Well, it turned out they wouldn’t put me on the air. They paid me for all three years, they pulled my show, and I sat and collected paychecks and I couldn’t say anything because my contract said I couldn’t do any cable nor any news shows for three years.

Now, one of the articles that got me started on this was this article

As reporter Sebastian Jones points out (see this and this), former Congressman Richard Gephardt runs a lobbying firm representing giant insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey sits on the board of a giant defense contractor, DynCorp, and lobbies for war.

And many other "pundits" interviewed by the mainstream news are really high-level lobbyists for giant companies, pushing their agendas.

And yet they are treated as "independent experts" by the media.

Indeed - 2 years after Jones asked the large networks why they don't have a disclaimer on the screen beneath the pundits' names saying who they really work for - nothing has been done.

The corporate media are acting like virtual "escort services" for the powerful, selling access - for a price - to viewers and to powerful government officials, instead of actually investigating and reporting on what those in power are actually doing.

And see this.

Here's the first link from above

The Media-Lobbying Complex

President Obama spent most of December 4 touring Allentown, Pennsylvania, meeting with local workers and discussing the economic crisis. A few hours later, the state's former governor, Tom Ridge, was on MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews, offering up his own recovery plan. There were "modest things" the White House might try, like cutting taxes or opening up credit for small businesses, but the real answer was for the president to "take his green agenda and blow it out of the box." The first step, Ridge explained, was to "create nuclear power plants." Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an "innovation setter" that would "create jobs, create exports."

As Ridge counseled the administration to "put that package together," he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren't told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation's largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated $248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.

Moments earlier, retired general and "NBC Military Analyst" Barry McCaffrey told viewers that the war in Afghanistan would require an additional "three- to ten-year effort" and "a lot of money." Unmentioned was the fact that DynCorp paid McCaffrey $182,309 in 2009 alone. The government had just granted DynCorp a five-year deal worth an estimated $5.9 billion to aid American forces in Afghanistan. The first year is locked in at $644 million, but the additional four options are subject to renewal, contingent on military needs and political realities.

In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey's financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the New York Times about the Pentagon's use of former military officers--many lobbying or consulting for military contractors--to get their talking points on television in exchange for access to decision-makers; and in 2009 bloggers uncovered how ex-Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe had guest-hosted Countdown With Keith Olbermann while working at a large PR firm specializing in "strategies for managing corporate reputation."

These incidents represent only a fraction of the covert corporate influence peddling on cable news, a four-month investigation by The Nation has found. Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances.

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