Intellectual Property Law

NYT Investigation Comes Complete with Videos of Source Material

By Cynthia Brumfield

The New York Times is perpetually under attack by Republicans for its supposed bias and the newspaper of record did drive itself into a journalistic ditch earlier this year with its handling of an investigation into John McCain's alleged "intimate" relationship with a telecom lobbyist. But the Times redeemed itself today with a remarkable investigation by David Barstow into how the Bush Pentagon manipulated the media with a campaign to use retired military officers as "message force multipliers" who posed as independent analysts on Fox, CNN, ABC and CBS while simply parroting what the Pentagon wanted them to say.

This domestic "psyops" campaign will surprise or disturb few people in Washington, where successful message manipulation is the ultimate goal (even if the consequence is an unwinnable, protracted war), and it's doubtful that the architects of this initiative will bear little reputational fallout as a consequence of the investigation.

So the Times article will likely have little impact on how things are done in DC. What's really interesting, though, is that accompanying the article is an entire section devoted to the source material Barstow relied upon in writing the piece.

The Times successfully sued the "Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation." The background source section presents many of the materials yielded by the Pentagon and convincingly demonstrates, through the use of video clips, that the military analysts were puppets repeating what they had been told to say.

Barstow narrates three different videos that lay out the materials he relied upon in his investigation. It's an innovative step in investigative journalism, made possible only by the rise of easy video publishing and inexpensive Web 2.0 technologies. This kind of transparency can only be good for journalism, particularly in-depth reporting, and is worthy of emulation.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on April 20, 2008 (boomark / email).