Last week, Stars & Stripes broke the news that the U.S. military had contracted with a company called the Rendon Group to profile and rate journalists who wanted to embed with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The firm, which had been involved with a controversial PR campaign to build public support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was tasked with evaluating reporters' work as “positive,” “negative,” and “neutral” and passing their recommendations along to Army commanders.
In light of the revelations, the military now says that it has cancelled the one-year $1.5 million contract, and has denied that it was using the Rendon analysis to deny some reporters access to the battlefield. While a bad move on the military’s part, I don’t see the Rendon contract as being as insidious as some would have it. What they’re doing, essentially, is the job that any good public affairs officer should be doing; namely, a little background research on what kind of stories the reporter in question normally publishes, in order to give their commanders an idea what to expect. It’s called a Google search, and spending taxpayer money to hire a contractor to perform such a simple task—and rating the reporters’ work on such a crude scale—is more of a crime in my book than producing such background reports in general.
Two reporters have already seen leaked copies their profiles, and there’s nothing necessarily damming in either report, other than one Rendon analyst’s seeming discomfort with the fact that Rolling Stone’s Nir Rosen actually, you know, sometimes interviews actual Afghans, rather than just ask the nearest Specialist or Lieutenant his take on the situation and dutifully transcribing it. Someone might want to explain to the analyst that talking to people is a little something we like to call “reporting,” and the more non-military views we get of the battlespace, the better.
Last summer, while I was aboard the USS Kearsarge doing a series of stories on Operation Continuing Promise, a Navy-led humanitarian effort in Nicaragua and Colombia, I received an email from a Rendon analyst, who informed me that she was tracking media stories of the operation, and “liked” the stuff I had written—which I can only take to mean that my scores are pretty damn impressive at this point. Being a big humanitarian operation, the Navy obviously wanted to squeeze as much press out of it as possible, but they also seemed to be throwing a lot of effort into finding out who was saying what, which doesn’t seem that hard considering a handful of journos and bloggers were invited by the Navy to tag along. Still, was Rendon, following along, using tax dollars already being paid to Navy public affairs officers to do their job for them. But on this trip at least, given the incompetence and lack of coordination shown by the Navy PAO shop aboard the ship, (which is a story for another time), they probably needed the extra help.
That the military is tracking the media’s output is evidence of little more than a misguided attempt at performing good due diligence. The last time I was in Iraq, commanders at a new unit I would embed with would often mention a blog post I had written a day or two before, which meant that they were keeping tabs—and that’s fine. I would be curious to know if commanders actually took the time to read though some of the journalist profiles produced by Rendon, or if they did, how much effect it had. Like I said, it’s not the reports themselves, but how they were meant to be used that’s the issue. Nir Rosen’s profile was full of warnings about his work, which had been highly critical of the American effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he still had his embed approved, which shows that not all commanders read—or even cared—about Rendon’s scoring system. I recently had my embed approved for Afghanistan (I leave next week), and I’d love to take a peek at my profile. I already know my stuff from the Kearsarge was a big hit with at least one Rendon employee.
