Keep your mind open, and be the change you want to see in the world. Your faith will guide you to peace and harmony. Keep the Indian people safe, guarding them with magnificent elephant warriors. What do you think? Would you help us compile something like that? Can we keep it from getting ad hominem or judgmental? Tell us in the comments.Be kind, Gandhi Bapu, and you will find yourself surrounded by the true friends.
HIDDEN AGENDA QUOTES PROFESSIONAL
It can't solve every problem Singer identifies - what about anonymous sources? What about someone who doesn't disclose all his/her professional ties? - but at least it gets more disclosure into a piece. Those of us who work in online journalism can link to a source's Wiki-entry as a way of contextualizing that source in an economic way. Plug in the news organizations and journalists who frequently quote a given wonk. If we need to track influence peddling, then it might make sense to put together a Wiki where defense wonks' ties to industries, think tanks, professional histories, pet projects, track record of advocacy and disclosed sources of funding are listed. In fact, here's one suggestion: Wiki-journalism. Sometimes people take money from defense-sector sources and are really knowledgeable about what they're talking about - sometimes because of those ties. But we also need to not make everyone we write about and cite seem like a compromised villain. Those presentations should center around the most important sources listed in a story. If I'm writing about, say, a weapons program, I should be able to attribute information to someone in a way that conveys a source's financial, professional or political stake in the issue. There are good professional ways to mitigate all these problems. (As Thompson did.) It's up to journalists to present everyone we cite in the fullest context, something that goes beyond disclosing a source's financial ties to a subject. And it doesn't shed any light on a subject for a reporter to ask an expert, "How do your industry ties influence your work?" since the think-tanker will just plead innocence.
Getting paid for that study can reinforce those tendencies, or it can cut against them, skewing someone's research. And they have a commitment to the subjects they study. They want to enter government service - another huge, rarely-disclosed influence on the people you see quoted. They generally agree with the positions the institution propounds.
People seek think tank jobs because of certain baseline similarities, compounding the echo-chamber worry. It's not just money that can skew someone's analysis, it's peer pressure and positive reinforcement. Nathan Hodge wrote a controversial and insightful Danger Room post a year ago lamenting the " susceptibility to groupthink" of major think tanks - yes, he included CNAS in there - that can be a more subtle influence than cash-in-hand. Tom Ricks is surely sincere when he writes that he doesn't even know what his agenda's supposed to be at the Center for a New American Security. Then there's another problem: think-tankers, journalists and others rarely consider themselves compromised by the phenomenon Singer identifies. On the defense beat, very few people are going to talk to you if you're not willing to let them talk candidly from time to time without being cited in some way. At the risk of sounding against disclosure - I'm totally for it - not every source's agenda can be presented to a reader, for reasons both practical (how meta do you want every post to be?) and professional. There's all the background conversations, IMs, emails and breeze-shooting between various sources and colleagues to help formulate stories or just frame someone's understanding of an issue. No story that you read is just a product of the sources whose words appear between quotation marks or are linked through hypertext. Only it may not get at the heart of the problem.
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