Four in the morning

1. The Great Recession means good skating in busted boom towns like Fresno. California is a place

2. The rich are different from you and me. They're deadbeats. NYT

3. Post-McChrystal era: The Defense Department clamps down hard on press coverage of the military. Stars and Stripes

4. "Despicable" ad in the LA Times. LAO

The spin cycle*,**

Public relations expert Eric Dezenhall yawns at last week's revelations from Stars and Stripes that the Pentagon used a private PR firm to screen journalists who wanted to embed with military units in Afghanistan. In a post entitled "Pentagon Caught, uh, Promoting Its Interests," Dezenhall tells us:

Profile-gate is emblematic of a pandemic of "news" stories where the publication of internal memos by cultural villains, usually corporations or industry associations, outlining programs that - push back from your computer screens because what you are about to read is not for the faint-of-heart -- PROMOTE THEIR INTERESTS!

Clever. But in addition to being a cultural villain to some, the Pentagon is prosecuting a war, and the central question driving the stories was whether the profiles were used to reward positive coverage and punish negative coverage of that war. Maybe Stars and Stripes got a little breathless at times, but answering that question promotes our interests.

Speaking of which, freelance journalist Jason Motlagh, writing at Time.com, says the military denied his request to embed with a special forces unit after the private PR firm gave him a negative review:

I recently applied to embed with U.S. Special Forces to cover a new initiative to raise and train civilian militias in Taliban strongholds. After waiting for more than a month for a response, I was accidentally copied on an e-mail sent by the public-affairs department to the presiding officer who would give or deny approval. A color-coded pie chart showed that 47% of my stories were deemed negative, 47% neutral and 6% positive. In a section titled "Key Takeaway Points," it was mentioned that my stories have been lengthy, with plenty of context and sources. It was added, however, that "most notably, he tends to quote experts" from a British think tank "which has been critical of the coalition mission and the Afghan government." A day after the e-mail — which included the Rendon analysis — was sent to the officer, my application was rejected without explanation.

*Update: Journalist Thomas Ricks also nonplussed by the Stars and Stripes stories.

**Update II: New York Times editorial board applauds the decision to dump the Rendon Group and encourages the Pentagon to focus its energy on conducting the war rather than shaping the story.

Pentagon cancels Rendon contract

The Pentagon has canceled a contract with the Rendon Group to develop profiles of reporters covering the military in the Afghanistan war zone, Stars and Stripes reports. The decision follows a week's worth of revelations from Stars and Stripes and elsewhere that the profiles, which rated reporters on whether they provided positive, negative or neutral coverage, were used to block at least two reporters from being embedded with military units.

Rated and rejected

The U.S. Army now acknowledges that it rejected reporters applying to embed with military units based in part on the ratings developed by the Rendon Group.

From Star and Stripes:

“If a reporter has been focused on nothing but negative topics, you’re not going to send him into a unit that’s not your best,” Maj. Patrick Seiber, spokesman for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, told Stars and Stripes. “There’s no win-win there for us. We’re not trying to control what they report, but we are trying to put our best foot forward.” ...

In at least two instances, Seiber said, he rejected embed requests based partly on what he read in the profiles — once because a reporter had allegedly done "poor reporting" and once because a journalist reportedly had violated embed rules by releasing classified information. The latter allegation, if true, would have been grounds for automatic denial of an embed request even in the absence of the profile.

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.

Four today

Coming off a weekend away from the computer, so excuse me if some of these are a bit stale.

1. The good news: The Pentagon has hired the same firm that helped put together the Iraqi National Congress, which fed false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to vet reporters who want to embed with U.S. troops in Afghanistan. From Stars and Stripes:

Rendon examines individual reporters’ recent work and determines whether the coverage was “positive,” “negative” or “neutral” compared to mission objectives, according to Rendon officials. It conducts similar analysis of general reporting trends about the war for the military and has been contracted for such work since 2005, according to the company. ...

U.S. Army officials in Iraq engaged in a similar vetting practice two months ago, when they barred a Stars and Stripes reporter from embedding with a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division because the reporter “refused to highlight” good news that military commanders wanted to emphasize.

2. How long before the Sun-Times sets?: The Chicago Sun-Times better make a deal soon or it might perish in bankruptcy court. Chicago Tribune

3. California watched: The Center for Investigative Reporting has announced its California Watch team. Former LA Timesman Robert Salladay, who had California's Capitol wired, will be a contributing writer and special adviser. Most of the members have a deep background in newspapers, which makes one wonder where the next generation of California Watchers is going to come from. CIR

4. The unkindest cut: Sam Zell, who may not be long for the Tribune Co., gets the rough treatment from Advertising Age:

The big man walks away a small man -- diminished in the eyes of history. He could have shuffled off this mortal coil with his legend as a real-estate genius intact, but instead he'll mostly be remembered for helping to drive the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and his other papers more quickly into the ground. Surely he'll be the last big man to try to become even bigger through media moguldom.

Fine, fine, pile on Zell. But the more salient point in the article is buried at the bottom:

But to bring this full circle to Mark Zuckerberg [founder and CEO of Facebook]: You could think of a guy like him, if he has lasting power, as the prototypical media mogul of the future, I suppose. Except that Zuckerberg, really, is a post-media mogul: a manager, basically, of an incredibly vast digital spreadsheet that we're all kind enough to fill for him with our personal data and updates and pictures and whatnot. He's running a virtual Trapper Keeper, and it'd be totally empty if he hadn't somehow convinced 250 million people to B.Y.O.C. -- bring your own content.

The content king of the past had pretensions to controlling us -- or at least the body politic, the public conversation, the local and national agenda -- by controlling information. But the content king of the future has it much easier; he controls us more directly. Because, loyal subjects that we are, we surrender our information to the king willingly.