Sometimes, you gotta read between the lines, baby. Like when the Pentagon comes out with shit like this, you need an interpreter to translate it from gibberish into plain English, dig?
The Pentagon has set up a new unit to focus on promoting its message across 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet.
The US Defence Department said it would expand its public relations work to fight “inaccurate” news stories.
Notice how “inaccurate” is in quotation marks? That means it means something other than it normally means, baby. Namely, that the news stories in question are, in fact, quite accurate, to the Five-Sided Hellmouth’s collective dismay. Makes it hard to recruit new warm bodies to stuff in the cannons, y’see.
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said media manipulation by enemies of the US is the only thing keeping him awake at night.
I’m sorry, y’all, but I have trouble picturing Rumsferatu actually sleeping, never mind losing sleep. He’s undead, so all he really does is lie in his coffin in pretended repose, meditating on all the blood out there that he hasn’t yet drunk to further maintain his unnatural unlife. So he’s lying a bit more squirmily of late; who the hell cares? So his batwings are a bit more itchy than usual. It IS almost Halloween, after all!
Domestic support for the war in Iraq has fallen as US mid-term polls near.
See what I mean about trouble and warm bodies, baby?
The opposition Democrats are trying to win control of Congress from the Republicans.
And they’ll probably succeed, too, unless Diebold has something to say about it. In which case, there could well be civil unrest. Now THAT is something for them to lose sleep (or in Rumsferatu’s case, suspended animation) about!
The newly-established Pentagon unit would use “new media” channels to push its message, a spokesman said.
“We’re looking at being quicker to respond to breaking news,” the spokesman said.
“Being quicker to respond, frankly, to inaccurate statements.”
Translation: Gotta get that lie around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on!
According to the BBC’s Justin Webb in Washington, the Bush administration does not believe the true picture of events in Iraq has been made public.
He says the administration is particularly concerned that insurgents in areas such as Iraq have been able to use the web to disseminate their message and give the impression they are more powerful than the US.
All right, now, this is complete bullshit, man. Anyone who’s been reading Baghdad Burning ought to know that the Pentagon’s biggest worry on the Internet isn’t triumphalist missives from the “insurgency” (translation: Iraqi resistance guerrillas and terrorists the US created), since the power grid in Iraq is at best erratic (and Internet access very spotty as a result), but the left-wing blogosphere in Europe and the Americas, which is in league with the forces of Truth.
A Pentagon memo seen by the Associated Press news agency said the new unit will “develop messages” for the 24-hour news cycle and aim to “correct the record”.
A spokesman said the unit would monitor media such as weblogs and would also employ “surrogates”, or top politicians or lobbyists who could be interviewed on TV and radio shows.
Translation: Fake interviewees to create more fake news.
Gotta catapult that crapaganda, dig?
