Guardian NewsBlog, 31 August 2006

By David Fickling

The American military is offering $20m over two years for anyone who can monitor the US, international and Middle Eastern media and ensure that a more positive message gets out.

We've been here before. Ever since the Iraq invasion, complaints about alleged media bias have been a regular fixture of autumn in Washington. Back in October 2003, President Bush was blaming the bad news out of Iraq on the media's "filter".

A year later came reports of a public relations campaign to sell the occupation ahead of the 2004 Presidential elections, and last year the conservative Media Research Center targeted America's TV news networks for their "defeatist coverage" of the war.

Given the scale of the problems that Washington faces in its war on terror, this refusal to accept the reasons behind the bad coverage from Iraq is astonishing.

Donald Rumsfeld, who was behind one of the creepiest bits of Bush-era public relations with his creation, closure and semi-secret resurrection of the Orwellian Office of Strategic Influence in 2002, was at it again in Salt Lake City earlier this week, comparing his critics to Nazi-era appeasers.

Even the Salt Lake City Tribune - hardly a hotbed of radicalism in one of the US's most conservative states - laid into Rumsfeld's "distorted vision of reality".

You can find the roots of this attitude in the sincere belief among many American conservatives that the media should be used as a partisan tool to advance their political ends - an attitude encapsulated in the infamous Nixon-era memo by late Supreme Court judge Lewis Powell, seen by many as the seed from which the modern conservative media backlash has grown.

The trouble with this policy is illustrated by the current tribulations of Kenneth Tomlinson, a Bush ally who oversees the US government's overseas broadcasts, including Voice of America and the spectacularly unsuccessful Arabic satellite channel al-Hurra.

Tomlinson has been ideologically reliable, but politically he is doing quite as much damage to the US government as a hostile New York Times editorial. Last year he was removed from the body overseeing public broadcaster PBS after his campaign to stop its perceived "liberas bias" exposed his own conservative bias.

Now he is facing criticism over claims of cronyism and accusations that he used his publicly-funded office to manage a team of racehorses.

The fact that Washington seems to believe its own propaganda, blaming the media for all this seems astonishing. But as US social theorist Eric Hoffer pointed out, propaganda doesn't so much deceive people, as help them to deceive themselves.