The day’s big media story belongs to David Barstow and his epic NYT story, Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand, on the Bush administration’s hearts and minds campaign.

Yes, retired generals on army pensions and with a lifetime of military service turn out not to have been the neutral thumb-suckers we all assumed they’d been transformed into when they took the network shilling.

OK, so that is a bit mean given the weight of material Barstow has assembled.

Still, Terry Heaton is unimpressed and throws in George Creel’s illuminating 1920 account of life running the Committee on Public Information – the Pentagon propaganda machine in WW1 – the modestly titled How We Advertised America.

In case you don’t have a copy, here is Creel explaining his mission in terms that even Torie Clarke might find a tad over-enthusiastic:

What we had to have was no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.

The war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends upon the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice.

What had to be driven home was that all business was the nation’s business and every task a common task for a single purpose.

Creel had to carry the message abroad too.

Unlike other countries, the United States had no subsidized press service with which to meet the emergency. As a matter of bitter fact, we had few direct news contacts of our own with the outside world, owing to a scheme of contracts that turned the foreign distribution of American news over to European agencies.

The volume of information that went out from our shores was small, and, what was worse, it was concerned only with the violent and unusual in our national life.

It was news of strikes and lynchings, riots, murder cases, graft prosecutions, sensational divorces, the bizarre extravagance of “sudden millionaires.”

Naturally enough, we were looked upon as a race of dollar-mad materialists, a land of cruel monopolists, our real rulers the corporations and our democracy a “fake.”

The New York Times review in 1920 called his book “embittered.”