Military politics

On Monday, the Fort Bragg Army base in North Carolina will host Sarah Palin, who is on a tour for her new book, "Going Rogue."

In agreeing to the public event, the U.S. Army initially banned the media from attending to ensure the promotion of a political book written by a politician didn't turn political. Army officials assumed the mere presence of journalists would encourage Palin, or her supporters (some of them in uniform, I presume), to criticize President Obama and his policies. So, the theory went, even if Palin or her supporters did say something critical, the fact that no journalists were there to report it would preserve the apolitical atmosphere.

The Associated Press and Fayettville Observer both complained, calling the ban illogical and unconstitutional. For one, they said the Army can't have a public event and then restrict the press. Second, they said the public has things like cameras, personal blogs and mouths with which they could broadcast the day's events. In the end, the U.S. Army relented and agreed to allow media in.

Uncle Sam wants you to stay positive*

Star and Stripes offers more details of the Pentagon's program to profile reporters and rate their work as "positive," "negative" or "neutral" before they're embedded with military units. The paper also found evidence that the ratings are used to shape coverage of the increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan.

From Star and Stripes:

One reporter on the staff of one of America’s pre-eminent newspapers is rated in a Pentagon report as “neutral to positive” in his coverage of the U.S. military. Any negative stories he writes “could possibly be neutralized” by feeding him mitigating quotes from military officials.

Another reporter, from a TV station, provides coverage from a “subjective angle,” according to his Pentagon profile. Steering him toward covering “the positive work of a successful operation” could “result in favorable coverage.”

The Pentagon had denied an earlier story that the ratings system, developed by an outside contractor, the Rendon Group, was used to determine which reporters would be embedded and even denied the ratings system existed. The evidence seems to contradict this. Again from Stars and Stripes:

“The purpose of this memo is to provide an assessment of [a reporter from a major U.S. newspaper] … in order to gauge the expected sentiment of his work while on an embed mission in Afghanistan,” reads the preamble to one of the reporter profiles prepared for the Pentagon by The Rendon Group, a controversial Washington-based public relations firm.

*Update: The Pentagon is now looking into the program that it once said didn't exist, Stars and Stripes now reports.

Black ops around downtown*

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean no one's out to get you...

Stealth helicopters have been circling above L.A. neighborhoods as part of a joint military exercise coordinated with the Los Angeles Police Department, the Eastsider LA blog discovered. An earlier effort to photograph one of these black helicopters as it flew by at night was somewhat less than successful.

(h/t LA Observed)

*Updated: Looks like the military maneuvers have spread farther and wider than just the neighborhoods around downtown. Larry Altman at the Daily Breeze reports sightings of helicopters over San Pedro and Rancho Palos Verdes.