In late August, the Washington Post reported the Department of Defense was using paid social media “influencers” to gain public support for the Trump administration’s stances on foreign policy and military reforms. An article a few days earlier in the hawkish but anti-Trump Bulwark had provided some similar allegations and examples.
Although the relatively new venue of social media adds a wrinkle, the tactic of the White House or the federal bureaucracy using ostensibly independent analysts to validate the national security state’s propaganda is not. That approach routinely polluted news coverage in the so-called mainstream media throughout the Cold War and has continued to this day.
Indeed, the latest scheme is marginally less insidious than many of its predecessors. At least this time the paid influencers are listed on official records as government employees. The Post noted that two of the most prominent new hires had “active official government email addresses as of this past week and are assigned to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. The email addresses include a ‘.civ’ suffix, meaning they are labeled as civilian employees, rather than as military personnel or contractors.” The Post also stressed that those two new paid influencers had “served for decades in uniform and, since retiring, have turned from the military to conservative commentary.”
Some of the examples in earlier administrations did not include even the modest transparency or other safeguards contained in Trump’s program to alert news consumers that the spokesmen they encountered were not truly independent analysts. Indeed, the government’s propaganda campaigns often went to great lengths to foster a false impression of independence. Nevertheless, even this latest, diluted version of a paid influencing campaign damages the quality and credibility of the news media’s role regarding important national security issues.
There is a long, ugly history of journalistic collusion with the national security state—especially the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). A 1977 investigative report in the New York Times noted that a decade earlier, when the agency’s communications empire was at its peak, the CIA used hundreds of news and public information organizations and individuals around the world. According to one C.I.A. official, the network was so extensive, it included a “third-string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper.” The CIA funded these foreign journalistic assets generously.
That Times report also contended that even some agency officials worried about “the potential ‘blow-back’—the possibility that the C.I.A. propaganda filtered through these assets, some of it purposely misleading or downright false, might be picked up by American reporters overseas and included in their dispatches to their publications at home.” Domestic and foreign information flows do not, indeed cannot, operate in hermetically sealed compartments. Some news stories originally appearing in overseas outlets inevitably find their way back to American outlets.
Such cynical manipulation and abuses did not end with the Cold War. Indeed, the presence of former national security bureaucrats masquerading as independent analysts may have expanded. The actions of ostensibly retired high-level officials from President Barack Obama’s administration especially should have fed public concerns. Individuals such as James Clapper, former director of the National Security Agency, and John Brennan, former director of the CIA, quickly became fixtures on television cable news shows, especially MSNBC. So did former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden.
The three men were hardly detached, objective analysts confining their observations and assessments of current issues to their previous areas of expertise. Instead, they were ideological, even partisan, in their analyses and conclusions. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden all became paid contributors to either MSNBC or CNN, part of a wave of intelligence officers who flooded the airwaves and op-ed pages.
Jack Shafer of POLITICO described in 2018 the increasingly common revolving door between the intelligence agencies and the news media. “In the old days,” Shafer contended, “America’s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs.” But today’s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan, Shafer contended: “He yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe, and signs a TV news contract, and then several times a week, he waits for a network limousine to shuttle him to the broadcast news studio.” The danger, Shafeer warns, is that “to almost a one, the TV spooks still identify with their former employers at the CIA, FBI, DEA, DHS, or other security agencies and remain protective of their institutions.”
A major problem is that networks do little or nothing to inform viewers that these prominent former officials aren’t detached, relatively neutral analysts. That’s bad enough when the commentators are prominent, household names like Brennan and Clapper. It is an even greater danger when more obscure but still significant ideological figures are involved. CBS News hired Michael Morrell, former deputy director and acting director of the CIA, to join the network as an on-air commentator. The network cynically sought to position Morell as an analyst with exceptional expertise in the intelligence field and no ideological agenda. However, even though he was no longer on the CIA payroll, Morell consistently pushed the agency’s perspective on many issues.
Worse than the situation with Morrell were the cases in which supposedly independent commentators (mostly retired military officers) were actively cooperating with and even taking instructions from the Pentagon while appearing as guest experts on news programs or publishing op-eds in major newspapers. Such individuals, for example, pushed for weapons systems that military leaders wanted and made the case for policy initiatives that the Pentagon favored.
Many of these supposedly independent analysts were nothing of the sort. A New York Times investigative report from 2008 concluded,
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military experts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.
The Defense Department even had an active program at one time to market specific friendly and cooperative analysts to news outlets. The potential financial conflicts of interest alone were massive in such situations. The Times noted that such media commentators “represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants.”
Such inherent ideological and financial conflicts of interest have not vanished with the passage of time. The Trump administration’s new paid influencer initiative brings to social media a long, sleazy track record of government propaganda masquerading as independent information on national security topics.
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