Journalistic Outrage: The Pentagon Paid a Disgraced PR Firm to Profile My Reporting

Editor's Note: Last week, news broke that the Pentagon had hired The Rendon Group, a controversial PR firm, to monitor the reporting of journalists embedded with the U.S. military, to assess whether they were giving "positive" coverage to its missions. Sparking controversy from journalism organizations, the Pentagon has just announced that it is canceling the contract with Rendon. In an e-mail sent over the weekend to Stars and Stripes, Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith said: "It was clear that the issue of Rendon's support to U.S. forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission."

Nir Rosen is one independent journalist who was profiled by The Rendon Group. In this account, he describes the documents produced by the PR firm, who warned the Pentagon that his reporting was "highly unfavorable to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan."

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This past July I was embedded with American soldiers in Afghanistan for a Rolling Stone Magazine article, with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. I was looking at American counterinsurgency and the declining security situation in Afghanistan, but first I had to get the military's approval to even embed with them.

The Rendon Group, controversial since it conducted propaganda on behalf of the Kuwaiti and American governments to help build American support for a war against Iraq in 1990, is the company to whom the U.S. military delegates the job of vetting reporters seeking to embed. Last week Stars and Stripes reported that the Pentagon is employing Rendon to profile reporters. I was shown a copy of the memorandum the Rendon group prepared about me. It is two and a half pages. A public affairs officer told me it was the most alarming report about a journalist that he had ever seen, and as a result I was grateful that Colonel Bill Hix was open minded enough to approve my embed despite the red flags raised about me.

"The purpose of this updated memo is to provide an assessment of freelance journalist Nir Rosen, and give a profile of his work, both through a summary of content and analysis of style, in order to gauge the expected sentiment of his work while on embed mission in Afghanistan."

In the background section the memorandum describes some of my past work, experience and skills. It also warned that "in late 2008 Rosen 'embedded' with the Taliban in several areas of Afghanistan. A lengthy report on his embedded experience appeared in Rolling Stone and was highly unfavorable to international efforts in Afghanistan."

In a section called Coverage, the memorandum called my previous Rolling Stone story on the Taliban "controversial," explaining that "Rosen's report was highly unfavorable to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. The article portrayed the Taliban as a relatively coherent and effective fighting force that, in reality, controls the majority of the country. Rosen relayed Taliban propaganda and exaggerations as factual information, without significantly noting the questionability of such information. Rosen also stated that the Taliban perform many of the functions of the government, such as providing judicial and security services. Lastly, corruption and defection among the Afghan National Police was also highlighted, including in sentiment directly from Taliban militants. In one interview, Rosen stated that reporters who have embedded with U.S. troops typically produce the same story, and that his Taliban "embed" was an attempt to find an original story. Rosen referred to Taliban commanders and leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan as 'officials,' apparently putting them on equal footing with the Afghan government. The report contained quotations from unnamed Western and UN officials and academics that supported his conclusion that Afghanistan is largely a lost cause. No U.S. officials were quoted to provide commentary on the issues examined in his reporting…In one video, produced by Democracy Now!, Rosen stated his belief that the war is unwinnable and that the U.S. should withdraw…Rosen has stated his opposition to the Iraq war in numerous articles."