Gates shuts down media response team

Bill Gertz:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has shut down a rapid-response press operation run out of the Pentagon speechwriting shop because it is not suited to his style of press relations, according to current and former defense officials.

The press operation was set up by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about two years ago. The former defense secretary was harshly critical of the press, as are other senior Bush administration officials, notably Vice President Dick Cheney.

Mr. Gates killed the unit several months ago and had its activities folded into other elements of the Pentagon"s public-affairs office, a senior defense official said.

"We continue to respond to false news stories and misleading stories about the Pentagon and the military in a variety of ways depending on the situation," the senior official said. "Secretary Gates made it clear when he arrived last December that this could be done without a rapid-response operation."

Said a former defense official: "The unit was an attempt to try and do a more aggressive job of getting the facts out when articles and stories appear. It was something Secretary Rumsfeld felt strongly about."

The unit would monitor U.S. and foreign press reports and highlight stories that were "missing key elements." It then would quickly send information to congressional and press contacts "so people could see the rest of the story," the former official said.

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This is a huge mistake. Rumsfeld started the program too late to really have the impact needed on al Qaeda and the anti war media's attempt to mislead and shape public opinion about the war, but it was still needed then and now. He is in effect ignoring the media battle space where half this war with al Qaeda is taking place. What was happening before the rapid response team is that the news cycle was outrunning the Defense Department's OODA loop so that by the time a response was given the news was several cycles ahead and no one paid attention to the truth. This allowed al Qaeda's narrative to stay out there. The media was following al Qaeda's script and we were not putting out an effective response. The NY Times would editorialize based ont eh false narrative rather than the facts as they did recently in their editorial pushing for retreat from Iraq and there would be no response.