The Care and Feeding of Military Analysts

Lt. Col. Robert L. Bateman is an infantryman, historian and prolific writer. Bateman was a military fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and has taught military history at the U.S. Military Academy. He is stationed in Washington, D.C.

The opinions he expresses in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. government or the armed forces.

Last weekend The New York Times published an account [1] it probably expected would be a major story that might gain legs and cause a significant uproar. It recounted how civilians in the Bush administration Pentagon deliberately tried to influence retired military “analysts” who regularly appeared on television news by giving them episodic access to the SecDef, briefings not available to the general public, and sometimes flying them to various locations like Iraq and Guantanamo Bay – in short, by giving the analysts the sort of access normally reserved for journalists.

The analysts, however, were not journalists, and some of them were not politically neutral from the outset. The blockbuster thesis, therefore, that came out of the 8,000-word, A1-above-the-fold story was pretty simple: Political appointees in the public affairs sections of the Department of Defense attempt to mitigate against what they think is bad news and play up what they think is good news.

That is about it. The details are useful and provide something for us to talk about, but when boiled down, that is the thesis.

I understand that next week the paper is considering a follow-up, an exposé on the idea that the solar system is, in fact, heliocentric.

Lumps of Coal

So what went wrong with the story, and what is there within the story that is actually useful? 

Well, for starters, there is the fact that there was no real differentiation by the Times in its characterization of these “analysts.” The quote marks around that word are deliberate because not all of the men described as such really deserve that term. Some were, in fact, apparently politically motivated shills who just happened to have once worn a uniform, but most were not. And that is the point. Not all of them, not even a majority of those cited by the Times, have actually been uniformly in favor of events on the ground since combat started in October 2001. Quite a few of the men cited by the Times have actually been almost unremittingly critical of the events on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. You would not know that, however, from the story.

Take, for example, one real standout: Maj. Gen. (retired) Robert Scales. Now a commentator for both NPR and Fox News, he has been one of the greatest critics of the conduct of operations since the outset. Similarly Gens. (retired) Barry McCaffrey and Montgomery Meigs, who have time and again spoken out about problems in current military operations, also were lumped in as an example of people being spun, spouting the administration's talking points. People, two of these men have been called to testify before Congress … by the Democrats! These men were some of the greatest critics of military affairs and the Rumsfeld Pentagon throughout the past five years. The Times never mentioned that in the story, apparently assuming that nobody would notice or care. That was a major part of its problem.

The inverse of that situation were the examples the Times presented in which an “analyst” was given material and then did a televised “hit” that ran counter to the desires of the civilian political appointees in the Department of Defense, and subsequently lost access. Yes, the Times presented that as an example of the hardball tactics apparently being used, but they missed two stops on the logic train. First, it is not much of a punishment if these private briefings were generally not known to the television news stations, a fact that the Times pointed out at the top of the story. If the stations did not know about (and value) this access for “their” analyst, then the loss of that selective access would not actually adversely affect the analyst, would it? Not where it counts, anyway. Second, the numerous examples the paper gave of analysts rejecting the spin put out by Republican civilian appointees also undercut the thesis of the story. In short, if you hold a spin session, and nobody is spun, was it a spin session?

For Example?

On a similar note, the Times story used ad hominem logic and again seems to have thought that nobody would notice. Ad hominem, of course, means “against the man,” and it is a common rhetorical method we often see in political campaigns. Person X makes a statement. Person Y, rather than addressing the value or fallacies of the statement, instead says, “But Person X is a bad person, therefore their statement is bad,” without addressing the statement for its content. In the case of the Times story, the paper never presented an example of just what materials the groups of military “analysts” were shown, but instead inferred that because it was information that was shown to this group by Pentagon political appointees, it was therefore false. It may have been false, it may have been true; we cannot tell for ourselves (and apparently the Times could not either) because the story did not address the content of the materials at all. That is just sloppy journalism, and worse, poor editing.

Now, all of this is not to suggest that the Republican civilian appointees in charge of this program have not tried, and probably tried as hard as they knew how, to spin America like a kitten dropped into a Maytag. I am not disputing that at all. But that is also not really news, is it?

The real story, on the other hand, might have been how spectacularly incompetent the civilians who tried this tack have been in their efforts. Point of evidence No. 1 would be the public opinion polls. Not exactly stellar, are they? Indeed, it is hard to imagine worse numbers for either the administration or its prosecution of the current conflicts. We are talking about numbers so low they may well set the 225-year record for such things. Thus, the effect of the spinners is difficult to discern as being, in any way, positive for the government. The second point of evidence may be the cause of the first, and that is the fact (which seems clear from the Times stories) that the overwhelming number of “analysts” granted such favored access by the civilians in the Pentagon were from Fox News.

Given that Fox carries the least military/war news [2] and that its audience is almost exclusively rabidly supportive of the administration, this does not seem like a logical use of the efforts or resources of the Pentagon public affairs civilians. When trying to influence the undecided or wavering, kowtowing to your base via the perpetual bloviations of the likes of Bill O’Reilly rarely helps.

Mining Nuggets: What Lessons Can We Learn?

There were elements of utility in The New York Times story. For starters, the article uncovered the potentially unsavory fact that there were quite a few business concerns among the analysts, which in any journalistic sense would immediately raise the red flag of a conflict of interest. They set off my alarm bells far more than the fairly obvious fact that most Fox news analysts (of any topic: law, medicine, the environment, the military) tend to favor Republican talking points given to them by elements of the administration. But the issue of conflict of interest seems nonpartisan, though potentially more disruptive. Unfortunately, the reporter or the editors decided to bury this aspect at the very bottom of the story.

In one case, a retired colonel also worked for a lobbying group, and while given access to some high-level civilian appointees (including Secretary Rumsfeld) because of his role as a television analyst, used that access and time to push forward a business agenda. While not, so far as I know, technically illegal, that definitely is a case of a conflict of interest. It might also make him more vulnerable to parroting whatever he was pumped, purely so that he could maintain his business-enhancing access. That is, without a doubt, a problem.

Similarly, some of the analysts who are retired generals also served on the boards of various major corporations. Here, though, the potential conflict of interest is reduced because a part-time analyst who is on television a few minutes a day, episodically, and who talks, in general, about tactical-level developments has only a tenuous hope that his appearances will help him profit from his board membership. Still, it raises the issue of disclosure, and that is relevant for all journalists.

Reporters live and die by their sources, and in a way an analyst is just another type of source. In the examples presented by the Times story, there was a very clear lapse on both sides. The news organizations did not (generally) ask, and the analysts did not tell. In the case of the few generals to whom this applied, it is less excusable. By the time one becomes a general officer, there are specific courses within the military that one attends that teach you about conflict-of-interest issues because for a general, they are relevant. So those men should have known enough to either recuse themselves (as a few apparently did on certain stories) or make clear to their hosting news companies just what their external affiliations were.

Can't Follow the Rules if You Don't Know The Rules

In the more egregious cases of the various captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels (all retired) who now make a living doing something else, and did not reveal their ties explicitly, I am afraid the blame for that falls upon the journalism side (at CNN, Fox, ABC and all the rest) for not getting their contributors straight. The simple reason for this is that none of these men would have ever been given any instruction on the concept of conflict-of-interest disclosures during their time in the military, and one can as sure as hell bet that none of them ever attended any journalism ethics course. So how were they to know this element of journalism ethics? Osmosis because of their proximity to reporters is not a viable course of action. The burden therefore fell on the newsies, and for their part they appeared to have failed in this across the board. They should have (and hopefully will in the future) made clear what the rules are about this sort of thing. Using myself as an example, as a career officer with 19 years in the military, I would not have a clue about the topic were I not also a historian and an academic who deals with ethics and journalism as well as the history of warfare.

Which raises an interesting corollary for print journalists: What about your sources for a print article? Do you need to query every retired military source with whom you interact about their business connections? It is a legitimate point and perhaps we should explore that at a later date.
 
The final lesson to be pulled from this mess is about the way television news folks use their military analysts. I will, for a moment, set aside the example of Fox News, because though it apparently has the most “analysts” on retainer, its analysts are also generally of the lowest ranks (some enlisted, a captain or two, a couple of majors and some colonels, in addition to just a few retired generals). Atop that, since Fox News presents absolutely the least amount of war news, and its coverage is generally the most blatantly biased, I see little point in dealing with it. Fox News is, in effect, incorrigible. (This is true despite the fact that among its analysts, it does have the one legitimate strategic thinker and completely neutral general out there, Maj. Gen. (retired) Bob Scales.)

The Rule of the Best Source

No, this lesson would be applicable to the other stations and to print journalists. For starters, one really needs to take a lot of care to match the source or the analyst to the story. Now for papers like the Virginian-Pilot, that is not really a problem. Almost all of its stories are going to be semi-local, and therefore the stories are going to be about either the Navy or the Marine Corps. Within its readership area, one cannot swing a dead cat without smacking a retired naval or Marine officer. Much the same applies to papers and local television stations in towns like San Diego (all Navy), or Las Vegas (surrounded by USAF bases) or San Antonio (with five Army bases and a veritable horde of retirees). But for the nationals, and the rest of the country, matching source/analyst to the story is important.

One of the most egregious television errors is when the news is about a ground combat event, say a firefight in Najaf, Iraq, or in the mountains of Afghanistan, and the analyst is a retired Air Force general. The fact of the matter is that an Air Force general knows about as much about ground combat as I do about spaceflight. Similarly, should the news be about harassment of U.S.  Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the commentator should not be a former Air Force fighter pilot or a former Marine colonel (and, it should go without saying, it should not be a former Army officer). Yet despite this, over and over again we see “analysts” who have no real personal experience in that type of operation talking on-screen about something that, at best, they have read about only in books.

War occurs in three environments, and each is unique. One would not interview a thoracic surgeon about issues of pediatric care, nor would you seek out the opinion of a criminologist to discuss the national debt and tax rates. You would look for an economist, right? Yet time and again, the apparent assumption among news producers, bookers and even reporters appears to have been, “well, he was in the military, so he must know about all those military thingees…” No, it does not work that way.

The bottom line is that one really must match the event with the type of officer interviewed. Not all “military officers” are created equal.

The author owns no stock in any media company, holds no appointments to any boards and is generally entirely beholden to the U.S. government for his monthly wages. You can write to him at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com [3]