The "Gentlemen's Agreement": When TV News Won't Identify Defense Lobbyists
As war rages, viewers watch commercials for weapons dealers, often without knowing it
When is a TV news interview not just an interview?
Leon Panetta was the nation’s top security official under Barack Obama, famous for his hangdog eyes and soft-spoken, equivocating defenses of torture and assassination of Americans while serving as both Secretary of Defense and CIA director. That was years ago. Today, he’s a senior counselor at Beacon Global Strategies, which represents a host of security companies, including famed munitions maker Raytheon. In Matt Orfalea’s booming video above, we see Panetta on a recent CNN broadcast stumping for Raytheon products like Javelin and Stinger missiles, with host Bianna Golodryga saying only that he “was America’s defense secretary and CIA director.” Orfalea goes on to capture how Panetta and other military “experts” chant WEAPONS WEAPONS WEAPONS over and over like they’re trying to open magic treasure chests, their commercial ties never revealed.
As war rages, there will be officials on TV with sincere opinions about how the U.S. can help Ukraine. Very often, however, what you’re watching is a paid lobbyist plugging for a weapons maker.
Joe Biden last week authorized another $800 million in military aid to Ukraine. This second major tranche of weapons came on the heels of weeks of passionate advocacy from former national security officials calling for heavy spending on reinforcements. Somewhere in the past, these commentators usually have impressive credentials. However, the more recent jobs of these commentators are often paid gigs helping military contractors “achieve their business objectives.” This phenomenon was embarrassing before Iraq, but the last months have seen near-total saturation of the airwaves by such figures.
The analyst might be a Lockheed board member and former Homeland Security Director like Jeh Johnson, or a former Pentagon chief of staff like Jeremy Bash, or former Army general David Petraeus, or any of a slew of others with august past titles and unannounced current jobs.
“I think we need to increase the arms sales, the equipment we provide… to send the right message,” said former Defense Secretary Mark Esper on CNBC in February, just before the outbreak of hostilities. Esper, who made history by jumping straight from being a Raytheon lobbyist to running the Pentagon — Biden’s first defense chief would make the same jump — made his comments just after CNBC flashed a graph showing the stock prices for the big five weapons makers, an inadvertent nod to the depressing merger of foreign policy and commerce as journalistic themes:
Admiral James Stavridis, a member of the Beacon Advisory board, has been stumping for more arms deliveries on NBC and MSNBC since war broke out, saying “we need to get the weapons in the hands of the Ukrainians,” touting Raytheon products as he blamed Donald Trump for “withholding shamefully the Javelins.” Other former generals like Wesley Clark, who has his own lobbying business, have urged new deliveries via print articles with headlines like “The time to arm Ukraine is right now.” Former Defense Secretary William Cohen has also been a regular on-air presence of late, always calling for more more more, and his own eponymous consultancy, The Cohen Group, routinely goes unmentioned.
I asked Jeff Cohen, co-founder of the media watchdog FAIR, if he thought the undisclosed lobbyist phenomenon was better, worse, or the same as it was during the runup to the Iraq war.
“I’d say it’s similar or worse now,” he replied. He noted that for sheer gall it was hard to top former General Barry McCaffrey saying on MSNBC in 2003, “Thank God for the Abrams tank and the Bradley fighting vehicle,” while sitting on the board of a company, Integrated Defense Technologies, which helped make both products.
Cohen, who wrote an entertaining book about his own misadventures as a commentator on stations like Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, describes a sleazy “gentlemen’s agreement” about attribution for such officials.
“If you’re listening to CNN, CBS, or PBS, and they introduce someone as a ‘former’ something, they’re lying to you,” he says. “What’s more relevant to the news consumer, that someone was an Undersecretary of Defense eight years ago, or that the same person is a highly paid lobbyist now? It’s obviously the second, but almost never revealed.”
How ironclad a tendency is the “gentlemen’s agreement”? When ex-Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson went on “Morning Joe” recently to talk Ukraine, Joe Scarborough did take time out to tell readers about Johnson’s “side gig” — as a DJ on an R&B podcast project. Joe kept mum about Johnson’s other side gig on the Lockheed board, of course.
Armament advertorial is a non-partisan phenomenon. You’ll see it on CNN, but just as much on Fox, also packed with analysts and even full-time contributors like Trey Gowdy who have lobbying histories. To take another example, former General Jack Keane has been on Fox of late applauding the $800 million tranche, saying areas like the Donbass are “very conducive to armor operations,” which surely has nothing to do with the fact that he served for years as chair of armored vehicle maker AM General.
Even on-air calls for foreign-made weapons may be backdoor endorsements of American arms sales. Barack Obama’s Undersecretary for Defense Michele Flournoy went on CNN’s “State of the Union with Jake Tapper” back on March 6th to talk about America giving or donating American-made weapons to foreign countries that donate Russian weapons like MiGs or S-300s to Ukraine. “There’s talk right now of the US giving Poland some fighter jets so that Poland can give those MIGS that the Ukranians know how to use,” Tapper said.
“Exactly,” Flournoy responded, adding other comments:
What the U.S. should be doing is more of what we are doing, which is, we need to be supplying Ukrainians with as much as we possibly can, munitions like anti-tank Javelin missiles, anti-air Stinger missiles…
There’s nothing more vulnerable than a tank column that's sitting there massed together, if you have the right aircraft…
And you have seen the Ukrainians be far more effective than we expected with just small unit kind of attacks using shoulder-fired missiles, small munitions. But, again, if they had some aircraft to fly and add to this mix, they could really do substantial damage…
Though CNN and Tapper do make an effort in this direction sometimes, they didn’t tell us here that Flournoy is not only the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, but the managing partner of WestExec Advisors, a firm she co-founded with Blinken (Jen Psaki also worked there). WestExec lobbyists have reportedly represented defense and aerospace firms like Boeing, which of course would be on a short list to replace donated MiGs. The public likely wouldn’t know a whole lot about this company had outlets like The American Prospect and the New York Times not done exposés about this firm, which to this day advertises its physical proximity to the White House as a selling point to potential lobbying clients, even putting a map on its site:
Reporters rarely make clear that even “donations” of foreign-built weaponry often end with someone paying for substitute packages of American arms.
When Panetta was interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently, he didn’t just push for Raytheon products, but also appeared enthused about foreign-manufactured weapons. “The key right now is for the United States and our allies to provide as many weapons as necessary,” he said, “whether it's Stingers or Javelins, whether its S-300s, S-400s, anti-aircraft, anti-tank, anti-personnel, whatever possible weapons can be provided to the Ukrainians, now is the time to do it.”
What he didn’t say is that the delivery of a non-American weapon like an S-300 or S-400 might very well be followed by the delivery of “replacement” batteries of, say, Raytheon-manufactured Patriot missiles. This is reportedly what we offered Slovakiain exchange for donating its S-300 system, for instance.
Bash, Panetta’s former senior advisor, is a type of creature we’ll surely see more of in the future. Like Stavradis, he is both a paid national security analyst for NBC, and a currently employed weapons lobbyist, serving as managing director at the aforementioned Beacon Global. When you see him on shows like “11th Hour With Stephanie Ruhle” hyping the delivery of surface-to-air missiles, or pushing new rhetorical boundaries by describing the Ukraine conflict as “not yet World War 3” or “not yet all-out nuclear confrontation,” you’re watching someone who collects checks from both a network and a firm that lobbies for a missile manufacturer. The viewer is at sea trying to figure out what’s opinion and what’s lobbying.
TV news stations are increasingly replacing reporters and analysts outright with former defense and intelligence officials. I counted over 35 of these hires just a few years ago. The influx of these “formers” into both TV and print journalism has radically changed coverage.
In 2008, David Barstow of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting about this phenomenon of military “journalists,” with “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” being one of the winning submissions. Barstow wrote about how defense officials on air retained ties to the Pentagon and gave official talking points on air in a coordinated way, quoting a former Green Beret and Fox analyst who said of military officials, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”
Networks and even papers like the Times have since become so dependent upon military and intelligence vets, both as bylined content-producers and as sources, that efforts to track lobbying ties have been abandoned. Both the Washington Post and New York Times won Pulitzers in 2018 for Russia-themed stories that relied on unnamed “current and former officials” from the military and intelligence worlds. In just over ten years, in other words, the Pulitzer committee went from rewarding papers for exposing defense ties to rewarding their concealment, while pushing intelligence-friendly news narratives — exactly what the Times was concerned about in 2008. Now, only outlets like Jacobin go near the lobbying topic.
Voices representing arms makers were once laundered through the think-tank system. The typical setup: weapons maker donated to think-tank, think-tank employee generated research pushing for defense spending, think-tanker then appeared on TV, identified as an “Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Rand Corporation” or a “senior fellow for the Atlantic Council.” It would be up to the viewer to discover the institution in question was funded by Raytheon or General Atomics or even directly by the Air Force, the Army, the State Department, or the Department of Homeland Security.
That system was quasi-necessary because news organizations once felt queasy about putting a weapons executive on air and not mentioning the relationship. Now, even in print, most outlets have gotten over any hesitancy they might once have had about such non-attributions. Here’s a passage from a recent New York Times storyabout the fire on the Moskva battleship:
“Warfare is a brutal thing,” said retired Adm. Gary Roughead, a former chief of naval operations. “You have to make the investments to defeat the kinds of weapons that people are going to throw at you.”
The reader here might like to know that the man who’s saying nations need to “make the investments” in weaponry isn’t just a former member of the armed services, but a current member of the Board of Directors at one of the world’s largest weapons-makers, Northrup-Grumman. But even the Times shrugs at this now.
Kelly Ayotte is no longer Senator of New Hampshire. She is, however, still chair of the board at BAE systems, which contracts for everything from cyber-security to the F-35. When local New Hampshire TV station WMUR asked her in March about Ukraine, they stuck to the “gentlemen’s agreement” and introduced her only as a former Senator. Ayotte went on to talk about how Ukraine needs “anti-tank weapons” (BAE makes them) and also “armed drones” (BAE makes them) and “air defense systems” (BAE makes them). This could be her real opinion, but how can any media outlet not bring up the relationship? WMUR declined to comment for this story.
Disclosure is so rare that it sticks out like a sore thumb when networks do it. On April 14th, Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC told her audience that guest Meghan O’Sullivan doesn’t just have Harvard and the Bush administration on her resume, but a seat on the board of Raytheon. She did the same when O’Sullivan went on the network to talk about how it was “wrong” to withdraw from Afghanistan. Taking two seconds to say, “She’s on the board of Raytheon technologies” doesn’t seem that hard, does it?
Still, when CNN and Fareed Zakharia interviewed O’Sullivan on April 10th, they told viewers about Harvard, and about O’Sullivan’s past as a senior advisor to George W. Bush for Iraq and Afghanistan (which would seem disqualifying for other reasons, but that’s a different topic), but not about Raytheon. Apparently, they didn’t have those seconds to spare.
While Panetta or Stavradis may openly stump for a particular weapons system, others will at least try to stay away from brand names. A little over a week ago, on April 17th, CBS Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan interviewed retired Lt. General Ben Hodges. At one point, Brennan asked Hodges about president Biden’s authorization of new weapons transfers to Ukraine, wondering, “How long does this kind of weaponry last? How significant is it to the fight?” Hodges replied:
What the Ukrainians need desperately are long range fires, rockets, artillery, drones that can… disrupt or destroy the systems that are causing so much damage in Ukrainian cities. The hundreds of switchblade drones, for example. These are very good, but we need about a thousand more.
The new $800 million aid package to Ukraine included what Politico called the “surprise” of the tranche, 121 Phoenix Ghost Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems, which are similar in functionality to switchblade drones. These unmanned weapons are made by a company called AEVEX. In March, Politico reported that a company called Republic Consulting registered as a lobbyist for AEVEX. Hodges happens to be a senior advisor at Republic Consulting. On the surface, not a great look.
Reached for this story, Hodges said he’d never worked with AEVEX and was surprised to discover Republic had a relationship with the firm. Moreover the previous shipment of switchblade drones were of a type manufactured by a different company, AeroVironment, with whom Republic doesn’t have a relationship. Hodges seemed genuinely alarmed about the situation and said it’s for this reason that he tries to avoid recommending one particular weapon system in public commentary.
“I actually try to stick to capabilities and requirements,” he said, “because I value my credibility as an analyst.”
Situations like that are why it’s so important for media companies to work through disclosure issues before putting someone on the air. It only takes about five minutes, but no one bothers. Audiences have a real need to try to sort out what policies are advisable and why, and they should be able to hear all the arguments divorced from financial considerations. With metronome predictability, networks instead rely for commentary almost exclusively on industry reps who focus on the idea that only more and better weapons systems will turn the tide.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a former Raytheon lobbyist like Esper, just met with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken — also a former lobbyist! — along with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Not only did Austin laud weapons deliveries in announcing more military aid, he offered casually that the U.S. policy goal is “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” This idea had only been hinted at to date, mainly via anonymous quotes. Austin added, referring to Zelensky: “We believe that they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support…While he’s grateful for all the things we’re doing, he’s also focused on what he thinks he’ll need next.”
Is the goal to end the war as expeditiously as possible, or to “see Russia weakened” through a costly proxy battle for the sake of the next Ukraine? This crucial question is rarely even addressed. What if what Zelensky “needs next” is diplomatic aid in addition to weapons? Because nobody gets paid to lobby for not-war, you’re unlikely to hear the idea raised.
Last week, the new streaming project CNN+ folded after just a month, an extraordinary testament to the cluelessness of major corporate outlets when it comes to reading mass audiences. TV executives treat such failures as unsolvable mysteries. They aren’t. Are you watching commentary, or a commercial? If viewers have to ask, the news operation is toast, and deserves to be.