How the US govt is attempting to hide real controversy.

The Propaganda model requires that if dissenting or controversial opinion is put forward in the media then good tame journalists will throw up "flak" contravening opinions presented as fact, insinuations about the dissenter's motivations and related propaganda about the subject showing that even if the disputed suggestion is true in general what the elite want us to think is true.

However the leak of ninety odd thousand government documents causes two major problems for the propaganda model. Firstly Wikileaks is too secretive and not well known enough to really pin specific blame on, its' leaks have covered a wide range of subjects. Nonetheless attempts are being made to suggest they some kind of malignant, ill defined ideology, as seen in the article I posted yesterday David Finkel, a good little journalist who despite knowing about the events of the helicopter gunship attacking civilians video for well over a year before it was released didn't make a fuss about, suggests that Wikileaks reason for leaking is suspect because "They provided artificial agenda driven context." Afterall, people merrily murdering civilians and laughing about it isn't a big deal unless you put some evil context on it.

Secondly though given the papers are government documents not meant to be released it is very difficult for the press to assert they're suspect or ideologically motivated, the sheer volume as well as the source undermines that. Unless the US military and government is deliberately lying to itself about Afghanistan (something of a controversy in itself) most of the tools of flak simply don't work.

However flak is mainly a tool of second resort, to suppress issues that have gotten past the first line of defence, the media defining what the elite talked about as the entire scope of news. But this is not the media's news, it is the governments so the US government is trying very hard to make out that while EVIL HILTER WIKILEAKS has endangered every brave Troop and destroyed Afghanistan with its' carelessness the actual information contained in those 90k documents is pretty boring and uninteresting. For instance Obama had this to say.

And yet mean old members of the media who are evil enough to point out the leaked documents do point out a range of things previously unknown or at least not acknowledged. Al Jazeera's report summarises most of the major problems but for specifics the leak revealed: a different death squad operation separate from JSOC's death squads called Task Force 373, at least 144 civilian deaths were known about but not reported by the US Military, the US government believes that the ISI (Pakistani intelligence service) is aiding the Taliban oh and we've actually known where Bin Laden was much more recently than claimed but capturing him might end the forever war and the contractor bonanza so it was kept quiet.

But yeah members of the public just trust the President and don't look too closely at what the leak actually contained, theres far more important things to do, like watching The View!