Military Industrial Media Complex

It is time for a rechristening: "military industrial complex" needs to be revised to "military industrial media complex". The New York Times story of April 20, 2008 describes a couple of ugly secrets: 1) supposedly independent "military analysts" appearing on TV and radio and sourced for print are tightly controlled by the military; and 2) many of these military folks have a financial interest in war because of contracts they have with defense contractors.

Deanie Mills has written a reader's blog entry for TPM that describes her reaction to the piece, as a wife and mother of military men. I found this part to be particularly poignant:

And yet, when my son and the Marines in his unit were plunged into the Battle of Fallujah less than a week after Bush was supposedly re-elected (they had to wait outside the city for two months because the administration was afraid that a bloody body-count just before an election might be a bad thing for their boy)--they did so with substandard body armor and old-fashioned Vietnam-era M-16 rifles.

(When they re-deployed 14 months and many deaths later, they finally had the right equipment.)

He commented to me at the time that the Marines hated the private contractors because, among other reasons, they had all the latest high-tech body armor, "and they had the M-4's with collapsible stocks and these great scopes, while we had our piece-of-crap rifles."

That would be the M-4s and body armor paid for by billion-dollar contracts that warmongering retired generals were pushing on TV and newspapers, which also served to make some of them very very rich--way beyond military-grade pay scales.

She also make the observation that "the networks all own stock in the private war-contracting businesses". I don't if that's literally true. Certainly it is true if she means it metaphorically, as in conflict (the war itself as well as pro-war/anti-war sparing) is great for ratings.