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February 9, 2005
SPECANNOUNCE

The U.S. military is to beam its own news coverage to millions of Americans.

Moving on from its phase of embedding journalists, or as some would say, ‘a policy of restricting and contolling the flow of information,’ the Pentagon will now produce and disseminate the news itself. It will be beamed to the public at no charge. The service will emanate from what is known as the Pentagon Channel, an internal public relations television unit within the Department of Defense. It was set up nine months ago.

The government-run TV service will be channeled to the public through EchoStar Communication’s Dish Network which will offer the Pentagon Channel to its more than 11 million viewers on a no-cost basis. Programming will appear on the network’s public interest channels and will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Dish viewers will be kept up to date with current military news and information including Department of Defense news briefings, military news, interviews with top defense officials, and short stories about the work of military people. …
Pentagon to broadcast to millions of U.S. homes
The very same story with the, soon to be broadcasted, special Pentagon touch on defenselink.mil 

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SPECANNOUNCE

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INGSOC

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The first initiatives to set up a military propaganda organization were in 1935-1936, principally by the Ministry of Propaganda. There was also a general consensus within the Wehrmacht command on the need for such an organization. The background to that perception was the broad agreement that the failure of German propaganda in World War I had had a decisive impact on the collapse of the German rear and had led to the German defeat.
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Film footage was forwarded directly to the ministry so that it could be incorporated into the weekly newsreels shown in movie theaters. The Germans were well aware of the topical importance of the news and did their utmost to dispatch the materials as quickly as possible.
Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops and the Jews (PDF)

Posted by b on February 9, 2005 at 22:06 UTC | Permalink
Comments

What can some say. It was coming. With all the pro-military commercials, glorifying the military during the super bowl, free games on the internet, on and on. I have railed on this site before about the glorification of the military in the US and this is the natural next extension of that glorification. I am calling Senator Levin tomorrow about this.
This is the result of a society in decline. We may not be the economic leader anymore, but we can still kick ass.

Posted by: jdp | Feb 9 2005 22:21 utc | 1

it’s still illegal to broadcast VOA to the american people, isn’t it? sure, VOA execs move on to run NPR domestically, but i thought channeling direct govt propaganda to the us citizens was publicly acknowledged as being off-limits. so how is this not propaganda or a sinister brainwashing to lower the resistance to a full-on military state? rummie originally went public w/ his disinfo office too and, even though he never killed that project, public outcry appeared overwhelmingly outraged. better not be using my tax $$$ to run it

Posted by: b real | Feb 9 2005 22:49 utc | 2

I see Pentagon Channel reports all the time as I receive American Forces Network television. You need not worry, it is pretty bad and will not steal viewers away from Faux or CNN. It is bland, probably intentionally so with olive drab graphics and closely cropped Marines reading the news. It is purely a house organ, words from the Donald and continual praise for a job well done. Troops are reminded daily how high their morale is and good news is plentiful.
What is worse is a bit called “Combat Camera” where military photo journalists display their work with a corny voice over. Rockwell style photos of soldiers handing out candy to children and advertising brochure type pix of military hardware in action. It will make you want to rush down to the recruiting office and sign up.

Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 9 2005 23:16 utc | 3

yea, i’ve seen that too, but isn’t it geared toward enlistees & their families? a 24-7-365 network aimed at the general public is a different thing entirely, unless they’re planning on everybody being an enlistee or family member…

Posted by: b real | Feb 9 2005 23:23 utc | 4

I prefer Animal Planet myself for adventure.
With all the cable news channels shilling for the this Admin. and cheerleading for the war, I prefer the Comedy Channel for news.

Posted by: FlashHarry | Feb 9 2005 23:31 utc | 5

b real
I really don’t think the Pentagon could put out a channel aiming at the general public. If it started taking share away from the private companies….well you can imagine how they would start complaining about government control of the media.
just my 2 cents.

Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 9 2005 23:42 utc | 6

On the subject of Orwell (@ Billmon’s most every day now). I don’t watch television not since sometime in the 70’s when I regularly watched some BBC (Monty Python and Masterpiece Theater). Sooooo, I went for a medical appointment today. When did tvs become furnishing in waiting rooms? And then I remember seeing a tv at the post office one day when I was waiting in line. Europe?? Is this over there? Just wondering why they suddenly (to me) seem to be everywhere they weren’t. How do I look in tinfoil?

Posted by: beq | Feb 10 2005 0:32 utc | 7

in secondary we received a new teacher from germany, at the same time school director, who was obviously not a cdu/csu apparatchik from bayern like the rest of the germans we had. he managed to rather wake us up and put weird expressions on the faces of many parents by reading books like ‘animal farm’, 1984 and select passages from roald dahl in german class.
why i talk about this is that looking into the past at controversial authors like orwell, dahl, de sade and others of their caliber we should look at their work with some respect and give them credit for having either been prescient or described in detail what they saw in their social entourage.
orwell is said to have been acquainted with people within the british intelligentsia of his time who i would tend to see as the ideologues of the british empire of the time and the (then) future. seen in this light, 1984 is probably more a description of probable outcomes of conversations and decision processes he witnessed than merely a literary work of social relevance. it should not surprise us if we see more and more things happening around us – worldwide – which will end up in a brave new world exactly like in the book.
the marquis de sade is another author i see in that light. while his oversexed and depraved lucubrations can easily be discounted as the ravings of a sex-starved prisoner, i see just too much of the degeneracy described in his works justine and juliette around me to discount him as a kook. de sade was in jail 27 years of his life because of his predilection for young girls, but the salient thing about his carcelary life is that he landed there because he pissed off his wife’s mother, who was from a family of the french noblesse, so he probably went to jail not so much for fucking minors but because he pissed off the wrong people. what stands out in the de sade novels is that most characters are powerful people like priests and bishops, nobility, civil administration heads, attorneys, judges, officers …
why i mention de sade is because when i look around me today i see a constant stream of priests involved in all sort of child molesting scandals, military and political officers not only aiding and abetting crime of all sorts but putting in place the conditions to make crime and strife flourish, politicians thieving and selling out … in short the confluence of organized crime and government as described by de sade in his works. until some years ago i and most people would have thought that all this could only happen in a sick mind, but every day that passes i have the impression that we are seeing a giant boil of pus and putrefaction coming to the surface and about to explode.
the pentagon, or should we say MINILOVE, has IMO overdone it with their specannounce. the problem they have is the fundamental discord between whatever they say and what people think and believe, they are preaching to a diminishing choir of faithful. this causes their rantings to exacerbate the differences even more between those who oppose them and their choir, and at the same time planting the seeds of doubt within their clientele.
if they see the necessity to promote their ‘goods’ in this way, at some level they sense that nobody – or too few – is believing on their free accord. when the results of their propaganda turn out to be meager, they will start to resort to violence in more overt ways. the arabs dont believe their crapola so there are now some regime changes in the cards. and here in the “west”, the more people turn away from corporate media and look at the internet for some substance in news, the more ‘they’ will come after the writers, informers and anybody and anything with the ability to put the lie to their false asseverations.

Posted by: name | Feb 10 2005 0:48 utc | 8

name: You know, I really begin to wonder if the main reason why Sade was jailed for so long is that he basically told things as they were, as they are, and his books aren’t that much fiction when it comes to the criminal depravity of the ruling classes. Most of what he wrote is going on right now, probably not on a massive scale, but still going on amidst our ruling elites in Europe and America, and too often even way beyond the ruling class.

Posted by: Clueless Joe | Feb 10 2005 1:24 utc | 9

@name
what will their consequence be, if not enough people will drink their kool-aid voluntarily?

Posted by: b | Feb 10 2005 1:46 utc | 10

@CluelessJoe
i think the poor marquis was infortunate enough to marry into one of the few families in the ruling class where certain behaviours were not approved so they sent him to jail in disgust. he in turn decided to rat everybody out but nobody believed him so his opus became known as literary work to the world.
@ Bernhard
what will their consequence be, if not enough people will drink their kool-aid voluntarily?
clampdown ? in the US they supposedly have the internment camps waiting, kool-aid dispensers and all. here in europe, europol has powers which by far exceed those of the gestapo.

Posted by: name | Feb 10 2005 2:31 utc | 11

I heard about this some weeks ago, and it really irked me. Shades of “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Handmaid’s Tale”… I think it’s done under the umbrella of the Discovery Channel… at least that is what I remember. As if we haven’t already got mucho glorified military crap on television as it is. I can barely watch the History/Hitler Channel anymore.
I wish they’d finally find the Higgs boson in Cern, Switzerland so we can get closer to getting the hell off this techno-barbarian soaked rock.
[/rant] 😉

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Feb 10 2005 4:39 utc | 12

Get a grip Kate. Your last couple of posts sound desperate. We’re all in this thang together and we need your help.

Posted by: rapt | Feb 10 2005 15:02 utc | 13

Yeah, well… hehe… grip. Desperate times. I appreciate the “buck up”, really I do, rapt. And thanks for noticing, as Eeyore might say. 😉

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Feb 10 2005 15:33 utc | 14

stan goff interview – “we can win, and we will win. if we don’t stop, we will defeat not just the war drive, but imperialism itself. have faith.”

Posted by: b real | Feb 10 2005 15:38 utc | 15

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