One of the winners of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic excellence is David Barstow of the New York Times. Altogether fourteen of the $10,000 Pulitzers were awarded this year. Barstow stands out among the recipients, however, for the courage and tenacity of his investigative work that yielded two most revealing front-page stories.
In difficult digging for the evidence, the Times reporter discovered how a team of retired generals had been co-opted by the Pentagon to work as radio and television analysts in order to make the case for the war in Iraq. On April 20, 2008, the Times published Barstow’s first report under the headline “Message Machine; Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand.” He described in detail how the Defense Department had supplied handpicked retirees with thousands of “talking points” since 2002.
Among the so-called analysts at NBC was Army General Barry R. McCaffrey. He served on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Another retired Army general, Montgomery Meigs, appeared on NBC’s ''Today'' also defending the Iraq adventure.
Fox News employed retired Air Force General Thomas G. McInerney and retired Army Colonel John C. Garrett. On CNN, Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live by phone from Guantánamo.
Kenneth Allard, who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, recalled that, as conditions in Iraq deteriorated, he saw “a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.”
It took Barstow two years to “wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department” that described its interactions with its network of military commentators. “We pushed as hard as we could,” Barstow later reported, “but the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act.” Ultimately, the judge overseeing The Times’ lawsuit threatened the Defense Department with sanctions if it continued to defy his deadlines for producing additional records.
After the publication of Barstow’s story about the Bush administration’s “Message Machine,” it took the Pentagon only six days before it announced on April 26 that it was suspending its briefings for retired military officers serving as expert commentators. The television programmers that invited them, however, have so far failed to tell their viewers what Bartow uncovered. They also failed to disclose the ties that most of those “analysts” had--and continue to have--to the businesses that benefited from policies they defended.
The television networks that so grievously betrayed the public trust include Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN. “They kept completely silent about Barstow's story,” the Pulitzer Committee noted, “even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs.” The Committee also confirmed that “the Pentagon's secret collaboration with these ‘independent analysts’ shaped multiple news stories from each of these outlets on a variety of critical topics.”
America’s media used to celebrate with pride when an investigating reporter received a Pulitzer-Prize. Now, however, when the winner is a conscientious journalist who reveals corrupt practices in television news programs, their operators remain ominously silent.