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The military newspaper “Stars & Stripes” reports that the Pentagon has asked a public relations firm to profile journalists embedded with U.S. forces and rate the tone of their coverage. Anchor Katy Clark finds out more from “Stars and Stripes” editor Howard Witt.

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KATY CLARK: For many news organizations, including this one, covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan means sometimes sending reporters to be embedded with U.S. military forces.  It turns out that those reporters are being reported on themselves.  The Pentagon has hired a Washington-based public relations firm to profile the work of journalists seeking embed assignments.  These profiles examine the work of individual reporters, and they evaluate them on the basis of whether they’re positive, negative or neutral stories.  Stars and Stripes broke this story and Howard Witt is an editor there.  Howard, in my own experience covering the military, I mean, I’ve just come to expect some kind of screening is par for the course.  Does this vetting process we’re talking about here go beyond straightforward due diligence?

HOWARD WITT: Well, it does appear to.  It’s certainly the case that the Pentagon would say that they’re just doing ordinary screening, but in fact, the real question is what are they doing with this information?  They’re not merely reviewing the work of reporters and rating it according to how positive it is towards the military, but they also are getting advise from this Renden Group that they’ve contracted with as to how to use that information to basically shape the embeds, the information that they’re going to give reporters access to try to basically manipulate the outcome of their stories.

KATY CLARK: And the Renden Group, this PR firm we mentioned has a bit of a controversial track record, doesn’t it?

HOWARD WITT: It does indeed.  That was the group that helped establish an Iraqi opposition group in the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003.  The group is called the Iraqi National Congress.  That group ended up supplying a lot of the information which subsequently turned out to be false regarding the alleged weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was supposedly hiding and which gave the Bush administration a lot of its pretext for launching the invasion.

KATY CLARK: So Howard, the implication here is that the Pentagon might be influencing coverage of the military and its conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. Have you found evidence of that?

HOWARD WITT: Well, we have first-hand evidence of what happens if you don’t write stories that please the military.  We ourselves had a reporter named Heath Druesen [ph] who was refused permission to embed with an Army unit in Mosul, Iraq several months ago.  And the stated reason was because he was not writing stories that were highlighting positive good news that the Army wanted highlighted.

KATY CLARK: So was he eventually able to go?  Were you able to work that out or send another –

HOWARD WITT: No.  We sent him elsewhere, but this particular unit he was not able to join this unit despite our strong protests over this

KATY CLARK: So what has the Pentagon response been to your reporting here.

HOWARD WITT: Well, today they continue to insist that they’re not making any nefarious use of these profiles, but they are at least acknowledging that they exists, kind of a frenzy was set off among the Pentagon reports today.  They’re all demanding their own profiles because they want to see what the Pentagon has been anything about them, and the Pentagon is now conceding, apparently, that they are going to re-examine this whole thing.  So we’ll have to see where it goes.

KATY CLARK: I find this odd because the idea of an embed was designed initially to improve news coverage in the first place and this is changing the way your news organization is covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

HOWARD WITT: Well, you’re exactly right.  And in fact, when these embeds were originally invented under the Bush administration, under previous secretary Rumsfeld, they were explicitly described by the Pentagon as not being subject to any kind of interference in the type of coverage or the tone of coverage.  It was strictly to facilitate U.S. reporters to cover the on the ground action of the U.S. Armed Forces.  But something happened between then and now, apparently, where the military seems to be treating these now somewhat differently.

KATY CLARK: Do you know when this type of screening of reporters first began?

HOWARD WITT: We don’t know when it first began, although we have seen some of these profiles dating back at least to October of last year.  There’s suggestions that it’s been going on a lot longer than that, but we don’t know for sure.

KATY CLARK: I understand that you’ve actually seen some of these files that the Pentagon has on reports.  What’s in them?

HOWARD WITT: Well, they contain — they all are kind of similar form.  They have kind of a bar graph or a pie chart, which looks at the stories that reporters did and rates them according to whether they are “positive, negative or neutral.”  And then there’s a whole narrative secants for each person in which the Renden folks described the tenor of that reporter’s coverage, whether it’s been positive or negative or neutral, and make recommendations as to the ways to what they neutralize negative reporting.

KATY CLARK: Howard Will is an editor at Stars and Stripes. He spoke with us from Washington. Thank you.

HOWARD WITT: My pleasure.

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