When Morning Joe went long with Rolling Stone great Military expose four days ago I said this:
WOW that’s absolutely positively…ordinary
Today at Hotair Bruce McQuain tells why Rolling Stone gathered no moss.
Hastings apparently took the word of LTC Michael Holmes as the premise and theme of his article. In fact he sets it up with a quote from Holmes:
“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. “I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.”
Except LTC Holmes job wasn’t “in psy-ops” (Psychological Operations) nor is LTC Holmes trained in PsyOps. That is a very specific Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) that requires school training. The place in which PsyOps is taught is the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Ft. Bragg, NC. According to Special Operations Command, the Special Warfare School has never heard of LTC Michael Holmes.
His conclusion?
In short Hastings was gulled by Holmes. If anyone was a victim of “psy-ops” here, it was Michael Hastings. His lack of knowledge about the command plus an apparent desire to put another general officer notch in his journalistic belt left him open to a sob story from a disgruntled officer that may have sounded good to him, but appears to have little or no basis in fact. A story from an officer who had already been reprimanded for making a false official statement.
Go and read the whole thing. Joe Scarborough? Better luck next time, will be interested in how you will report on this stories crash and burn. As for Rolling Stone…I suggest you stick to Bieber manina.
One of the advantages that control of the MSM and the major newspapers gives the media is the ability to convince people who do not regularly pay attention to current events beyond Charlie Sheen, Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber of things that simply aren’t true.
Half of this battle is ignoring stories that they don’t want promoted (see “The News Hounds that didn’t bark” or this link at Big Government of yet ANOTHER assault on a tea party member by a union man“. The other half is manipulating the reporting on events that are covered. Today’s example is Move-on’s “50 state rally” attempt to rally non-union types.
By all accounts the rallies didn’t energize much of anyone:
Despite the best efforts of the state-run media and the far left, protesters failed to materialize today at the dozens of rallies in support of government employee unions. Maybe it’s because government employees make twice as much as the private sector?
Let’s face it. These were no tea party numbers despite their best astroturfing efforts.
In Jefferson City, Missouri about 200 and around 300 counter tea party protesters turned out at competing rallies. The tea party protesters, of course, showed more energy. In St. Louis only 40-50 protested. In Utah maybe a couple hundred turned out.
Possibly 300 in Virginia. Around 500 in Washington DC where a bunch of loosely-connected leftist groups took turns complaining about the usual suspects: corporations, the rich, Speaker Boehner, the Tea Party, and men. Los Angeles may have had one to two thousand in attendance – including self-avowed socialists.
Over all, it was a complete failure. But, don’t tell the state-run media.It doesn’t fit their agenda.
So how horrible was the turnout? There were more people at the Recall Wisconsin Senator Wirch rally today that there were at several of the MoveOn rallies.
‘It seems that unless government workers get a paid day off (from us) they’re not too interested in taking their unpaid days off to protest.’”
Meanwhile Professor Jacobson who has some harder numbers notes that the media had already decided that Move-on’s protests were successful:
Outside of Madison, there were no reports of sizable crowds. And if you read the news reports, almost all the protesters were other union members. Despite the efforts, the organizers failed to motivate significant numbers of non-union members to come out for protests.
The 50-state protest was a failure, plain and simple, although the images from Madison may create the false impression of massive nationwide protests.
Update: As predicted, the mainstream media is painting the nationwide protest as a success. The headlines talk about protests around the country, but the stories talk almost entirely about Madison, giving the false impression that there was widespread support around the country:
Why is this important? He explains
Since NYT and AP stories are run at thousands of local newspapers around the country who cannot create their own content, it is likely that most people in this country never will hear about the dismal turnout for these protests. This is your biased MSM in action.
The idea is to go into the fight with a pre-ordained template and to find a way to manipulate the available information to make it fit.
The target of this is not those who are involved but those who are not, who don’t check out the cable news (except for during a huge crisis or maybe just before an election) those who will catch only a glimmer of what is happening and then when in a position to make a decision will have only that glimmer as a reference, something that “everybody knows”. It’s playing on the nature of belief.
In the 3rd episode of the Doctor Who Serial Image of the Fendahl from 1977 there is an exchange between the elderly Mrs. Tyler and her grandson when she tries to give him a charm and he objects:
Jack Tyler: “You know that I don’t believe in all that.”
Mrs. Tyler: “Most around ‘ere do and when most believe that da make it true.”
Jack Tyler: “Most people used to believe that the earth was flat, but it was still round,”
Mrs. Tyler: “Ha ha but they behaved as it were flat!”
The exchange begins at 6:51
And that is, as always, the goal of the MSM. To make people behave “as it were flat!” so that when a person on a show says: “the Union protesters are peaceful or the Tea Party is violent” that it will be accepted as common knowledge.
Thousands of people rallied in cities across the United States on Saturday against a Wisconsin plan to curb the power of public sector unions that has sparked similar government efforts in other states.
The headline Labor protests draw thousands across United States is telling, 50 states and “thousands” how many thousands? one thousands? two thousands? only when you go deep into the story do you see only one rally cited with even 1000 people outside of Madison.
Update: Thanks glenn. Just to give you an idea of how many Hits Instapundit gives. Glenn’s link to me was the 3rd update on a post put up 12 hours ago. that means the vast majority of his readers have already read that post, yet it has generated 100 hits in 2 hours on a Sunday morning.
On tomorrow’s DaTechGuy on DaRadio (10 a.m. to noon ) on AM 830 WCRN Jazz Shaw is going to be our guest in the first hour. The Big topics will of course be events in Wisconsin and Tripoli but I think I’ll want to touch a bit about this piece on RNC chair Priebus.
Yes. Well… very nearly. And if you think that’s a bad thing, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Priebus is doing precisely what an RNC chair is supposed to be doing. He’s mending fences, bringing the big dollar donors back to the fold, raising money and quietly organizing his forces for the next cycle.
Your chairman should be an invisible man and so far Priebus has been that. Now of course with events in Egypt, Tripoli and Wisconsin and Gas prices, Food Prices etc there isn’t a lot of reason for him to be noticed but that’s the whole point.
In our second hour joining Jazz and Roxeanne will be will be joined by Sissy Willis as we go though the week’s issues.
Make sure you catch Me and the entire WCRN Saturday lineup starting at 6 a.m. With the Wesley and Weston review, Conservatively Speaking at 7, and Carole Ann Brown at 9 and I’ll be bringing us to noon starting at 10. Don’t miss it.
Update: Roxeanne can’t make it, there goes the 18-34 young men demographic, Sissy is cute but Roxeanne is single!
Morning Joe was breathless today reporting that the well-known bastion of journalistic mud-racking on government issues Rolling Stone magazine is reporting that our troops were using “psi-ops” against US senators.
Joe breathlessly reported this as a turning point, Norah O’Donnell subbing for Mika talked about it breathlessly and then when the panel started talking about it, the one person who had actually read the article, found very little there there:
So I figured I’d take a look at rolling stone, to see what that pillar of serious news had to say.
The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war
WOAH! sounds nasty! No wonder they hate soldiers at Columbia. Did they bug their hotels looking for dirt, plant hot blonds to snooze them and take pictures? Maybe they waterboarded or drugged them? What nefarious methods did Rolling Stone uncover that the Evil US army used against senators:
According to Holmes, who attended at least a dozen meetings with Caldwell to discuss the operation, the general wanted the IO unit to do the kind of seemingly innocuous work usually delegated to the two dozen members of his public affairs staff: compiling detailed profiles of the VIPs, including their voting records, their likes and dislikes, and their “hot-button issues.” In one email to Holmes, Caldwell’s staff also wanted to know how to shape the general’s presentations to the visiting dignitaries, and how best to “refine our messaging.” emphasis mine
…WOW that’s absolutely positively…ordinary, but I’m sure that it gets worse because in the very next paragraph it says:
According to Holmes, the general wanted the IO team to provide a “deeper analysis of pressure points we could use to leverage the delegation for more funds.” The general’s chief of staff also asked Holmes how Caldwell could secretly manipulate the U.S. lawmakers without their knowledge. “How do we get these guys to give us more people?” he demanded. “What do I have to plant inside their heads?”
Wow he wants to find pressure point, he want to plant stuff inside their heads, boy this sounds a lot like…..lobbying.
But it’s not like Holmes the source for this story had a grudge. After all any soldier could be the subject of an Ar 15-6 investigation. And I’m sure many Colonials and their female Majors under them get reprimands over an “inappropriate relationship”. After all Rolling Stone covers stuff like this all the time and married or no they understand that as Holmes wrote: “Gimmee a break a man has needs you know.”
So this is the breathless story that Morning Joe started the show with and Norah O’Donnell in their first hour. It flew like a lead balloon and made such an impact that they followed up with their 2nd hour to go long with the crank call to Gov Walker before trying once again to sell this story as the template for the anti-war left, this time without Jamie Rubin who had popped their bubble in the first hour as MSNBC runs with the story.
The real problem lately has been reports out of Afghanistan have been encouraging and the agenda of the left when it comes to Afghanistan is the opposite of Reagan’s “We win they lose”.
One of the people who I ran into CPAC was the young lady who last year worked for Joe Scarborough who had given me the high compliment of saying I was tough but fair on him. When she greeted me I mentioned that I was even harder on him lately, she approved and it was suggested that he was more concerned these days with being accepted by the cocktail set.
When I talk about Morning Joe these days I’m often teased that I follow it because so few people watch it. The more I see of it lately the more that critique seems justified.
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