In the context of an article about retired officers serving as 'experts' and not disclosing their affiliations, I feel compelled to admit that I am an Aaron Brown fan, having watched his snarky wit and commentary as an anchor in Seattle long before we went to 'the show' (or CNN, where it was like watching "Broadcast News" over and over ... I started calling him Aaron Brooks). I have no financial interest in him, however.

1. I got most of my news during the run up from print media and non-media sources, so I don't have a sizeable enough sample of AB's show to argue. I know that Sheppard has been on for years, maybe since the 1991 war. I laugh every time I hear him offer his expert opinion on special ops, about which he knows zilch.

Grange continues to this day to show up and expose his biases as he always has done. When he said in the NYT article that they 'were only given factual information', I think he's lying. In the snippet where Aycharaych says he's lying, I think he's just giving his opinion, though we are supposed to accept his assumptions at face value because he is an 'independent expert'.

(Relatedly --- what Grange says here is exactly what was floating around in a bunch of think tank national security newsletters all during 2002, namely that the 'real' case for an Iraq invasion was this geostrategic one as part of GWOT. Pollack did the same thing. This infuriated me to no end; if that was the 'real' case for the war, then that's what should have been put to the American people, not a bunch of lies about WMD, vague implications that Saddam was behind 9/11, etc ... but I don't rememebr anyone else calling anyone out on that then, either)

2. I posted in the last thread about Wesley Clark's appearance, which seems to satisfy AB's definition of 'tactical' commentary. It was also critical enough to get some stinging rebukes from the right, all dutifully covered by broadcast news media. That might be the exception that proves the rule, though, since Clark's sitting alongside Brown in the newsroom and taking calls was very different from Sheppard's war room with operational graphics and pizzazz. I don't think they called Clark a 'military analyst', either. Or maybe they did eventually, having run out of explanatins for why he was still on several days after his one-night guest appearance.

3. I wrote in the previous thread about how personally I took the 'analysts's' ethical failings, and others will comment about how there's basically no good reason to believe anything that anyone in uniform says (which is a valid outcome of this, sadly). But Glenn's careful attention to the issue makes clear where the locus of responsibility is: on the media who host them, vet them, and take responsibility for providing context and balance (or are accountable when they don't). Sure, they have to rely on 'the professionals' for some technical content, i.e. how and why we're seeing what we're seeing, etc, but it's pretty elementary that you have to figure out how to flesh out that picture, and not let the entire story be swallowed up (and the political implications neutered) by all the 'speeds and feeds'.

I'm just restating the obvious, because I'm trying to get my head around the whole scope of what's happened here. There was a journalistic failure (an ongoing one), which allowed the administration to get away with exploiting many institutional weaknesses to wreck many institutions (including the military, intelligence community, diplomatic community ...) and produce a catastrophe that, also due to said journalistic failure, they will never be held accountable for.

Right. Got it.

I had a slightly different take on AB's quote here ... we think of 'the war' now as the thing that has been going on for the past 5+ years, whereas at the time, 'the war' was the thing that was going on for 'weeks not months' (ahem) and everything that came afterwards was something else (inside govt and contractor circles, it was always 'phase IV', referring to the doctrine of stability operations, another loaded euphemism).

That changes Brown's meaning, somewhat. If I read that correctly, he wouldn't be saying that journalism's role is merely technical evaluation, but that the technical eval would happen as the event was ongoing, and then the analysis would follow. Among TV journalists, where ADD seems to be the rule, that seems like a consistent view. Which kind of illustrates the problem, no?

Let's make that promenade into a perp walk, shall we?

I think USAF's advertising has more to do with service competition. Not that it isn't a problem, just a different kind of problem.

There's been a controversial trend lately with the Air Force taking out advertising aimed at John Q Public to make their case for their own budgetary priorities ... they've been smacked for it in Congress. Gates also recently beat them up for hoarding their Predator drones instead of sending them 'downrange'. (I'm bandwidth challenged at the moment and looking up links will crash me again)

USAF recently launched a Cyber Command, which is a big deal for them. The mission has to do with preventing hack-attacks from overseas; given their current struggles to define their mission and budget justifications (a story going back to 1991), and their lack of involvement in NSA looking in everyone's orifices, I would be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that that's really what they want to do.

(Naturally, one mission could change into the other, if that was a way to preserve the institution, so it bears watching ...)