From WNYKRC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was roundly condemned last year

when he unveiled the Pentagon's new Office of Strategic Influence to feed disinformation to the foreign media.

He claimed it was all a misunderstanding and supposedly

scrapped the idea, but recently in the LA Times, military analyst and critic Bill Arkin

explained that the Office of Strategic Influence is not dead, but thriving under different names

throughout the Pentagon. Arkin has obtained dozens of Pentagon documents that describe in detail

how the military has restructured itself top to bottom to fight a global information war that could blow back into the United States.

What you have is stories that are coming out or being manufactured,

supposedly for the consumption of the Islamic

publics, stories that, say, for instance, might originate in Egypt or Jordan or Algeria,

some of the countries that are, it is clear that the United States has bought off the

intelligence services of, and those stories will make their way back into the U.S.

It's those kinds of stories where they don't go through the same kind of rigorous checks

and balances and editing and double checking and double sourcing that you might have in the

American media, where all of a sudden things that aren't fact become fact because they get picked up in the American media where all of a sudden things that aren't fact become fact because they get

picked up in the international media and ultimately find their way back into the American

public's mind.

Can you give me some specific examples of how these doctrines will manipulate the American

news media?

I guess on some level all I can do is point to the

organizations because we don't know yet what they are actually doing or how it has had influence.

...