All the News That's Fit to Buy

The Bush era has brought a robust simplicity to the business of news management: Where possible, buy journalists to turn out favorable stories, and as far as hostiles are concerned, if you think you can get away with it, shoot them or blow them up. As with much else in the Bush era, the novelty lies in the openness with which these strategies have been conducted.

Regarding the strategies themselves, there's nothing fundamentally new, in terms of paid coverage or murder, as the killing in 1948 of CBS reporter George Polk suggests. Polk, found floating in the Bay of Salonika after being shot in the head, had become a serious inconvenience to a prime concern of US covert operations at the time, namely the onslaught on Communists in Greece.

Today we have the comical saga of the Pentagon turning to a Washington-based subcontractor, the Lincoln Group, to write and translate, for distribution to Iraqi news outlets, booster stories about the US military's successes in Iraq. Simultaneously comes news of Bush's plan, mooted to Tony Blair in April 2004, to bomb the HQ of Al Jazeera in Qatar. Earlier assaults on Al Jazeera came in the form of a 2001 strike on the network's office in Kabul. In November 2002 the US Air Force had another crack at the target and this time managed to blow it up. In April 2003 a US fighter plane targeted and killed Al Jazeera reporter Tariq Ayoub on the roof of the network's Baghdad office. On the same day US forces also killed Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and José Couso of the Spanish television network Telecinco. Nearby, US artillery blasted the Baghdad office of an Abu Dhabi television station.

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