From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

If you wanted an unbiased assessment of the war in Iraq, who would you turn to?

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cowan is a retired U.S. Marine and a Fox News military analyst.

Welcome back to Harbour while the political battle over Iraq, the war funding and the troop patrol issues,

heat up General Barry McCaffrey, just get back from Iraq. And we're joined now in our studio by

Major General Robert Scales, one of NPR's military consultants. As reported by David Barstow in the New York

Times last weekend, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and others have turned again and again to military analysts,

retired members of the armed forces.

Only, it turns out, the analysts were often coached by the Pentagon in what the Times said

were hundreds of private briefings.

They were treated to tours of Iraq and frozen out when they failed to tout the Pentagon line.

As if that weren't compromising enough, many of the analysts have financial ties to military contractors,

who stood to benefit from positive appraisals of the war.

Among the many analysts named by the Times was Major Robert Bevalocqua, a former Green Beret and Fox News contributor through 2005, who had his first sit down with the Pentagon Brass in 2003.

And, of course, I'm the lowest ranking guy in the room because I'm a former major, and the majority of the folks there were retired generals, some three stars, two stars,

basically the whole Milky Way.

Large oblong table and a packet which contains slides in general information or talking points,

if you will, that the Pentagon wanted to use.

The intent was obvious.

It was to give us the party line so we would at least have it and know it verbatim.

...