Non-scandal of the week

The LA Times revealed this week that the U.S. military has paid Iraqi newspapers to run pro-U.S. articles.

The task force also bought a newspaper and "took control" of a radio station (sounds like they sent in a SWAT team and held the announcers hostage, but that would be too juicy a detail to leave out, so it was probably just some unused bandwidth).

Anyway, does the LA Times remember Voice of America or Radio Free Europe? Radio Liberty broadcast Father Alexander Schmemann's sermons into the Soviet Union for 30 years.

So the task force writes and translates articles and pays the newspapers to run them. Sounds like a win-win to me. Unless the Times is presuming that the poor benighted Iraqis can't discern a pro-American article when they see one. Well, welcome to the age of the Internet, O newspaper of plummeting circulation that runs Democratic Party press releases for free. We all have other sources of news now, and newspapers are being held responsible for their bias. If the Iraqi readers don't like seeing pro-American articles in their pages, they won't read them or they won't buy those papers. On the other hand, it might be nice to see a pro-American article occasionally in the LA Times.

Next scandal up: The president wears socks. I kid you not. Black ones, too.

UPDATE: In an LA Times column, Walter Jajko goes into more detail about the need to join the propaganda war.