NBC's "One-Man Military-Industrial-Media Complex"

By Diane Farsetta, PR Watch. Posted December 8, 2008.

But, as it turns out, McCaffrey's association with Fleishman-Hillard goes back a decade. In 1998, the firm won a major PR contract from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), which McCaffrey then headed. The ONDCP contract brought Fleishman-Hillard $9.4 million in 1999.

While Fleishman-Hillard still works for ONDCP, there were two controversies of note under McCaffrey's tenure. One was ONDCP's allowing television networks to avoid airing anti-drug public service announcements -- which left them more airtime to sell to advertisers -- by incorporating anti-drug messages into their programming. (The deal was exposed by Salon.com; Fleishman-Hillard was responsible for the "outreach to and collaboration with the entertainment industry.")

The other controversy involved an unflattering article in the New Yorker, by Seymour Hersh. The May 2000 article was titled, "Overwhelming Force." It cited evidence that a military action by McCaffrey's unit in Iraq, as part of the first Gulf War, occurred "two days into a ceasefire" and "was not so much a counterattack provoked by enemy fire," as McCaffrey later described it, "as a systematic destruction of Iraqis who were generally fulfilling the requirements of the retreat."

Before the New Yorker article appeared in print, McCaffrey contacted Paul Johnson, who was the head of Fleishman-Hillard's Washington DC office and worked on the ONDCP account. McCaffrey asked Johnson for advice on how to handle the damaging New Yorker piece. Johnson -- who later worked with McCaffrey at Fleishman-Hillard's homeland security practice -- gave him free PR advice, as a "personal favor," stressing that "it never even occurred to" him to bill ONDCP for the time.

The experience might have helped McCaffrey formulate a response to Barstow's Pentagon pundit investigations. McCaffrey apparently discussed a coordinated response with NBC News officials, more than a week before Barstow's latest article appeared. NBC shared with McCaffrey the protests it lodged with Barstow, which called the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter's work "a gross distortion of the truth."

"Very balanced, objective response," McCaffrey emailed back to three NBC contacts, including anchor Brian Williams. "Underscores my view of NBC as an enterprise based on journalistics [sic] ethics--- and courage.

See more stories tagged with: new york times, donald rumsfeld, nbc, david barstow, barry mccaffrey, pentagon pundits, pentagon propaganda

Diane Farsetta is senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy.

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