The Pentagon reportedly had a program where it paid to ensure that positive news made it into the media in Iraq.
The Los Angeles Times quoted unidentified officials as saying that some of the stories in Iraqi newspapers were written by U.S. troops and while basically factual, they sometimes give readers a slanted view of what is happening in Iraq.
There's a more subtle problem with such a program. Tampering with the news feed also taints open source intelligence efforts. Emphasis mine.
OSINT is intelligence gained from open -- unrestricted, non-secret --sources, and it's one of the key forms of intelligence, alongside human-source intelligence (HUMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), imagery intelligence (IMINT), among others. It is openly available intelligence, and its sources include all manners of journalism, whether broadcast, printed or blogged.
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