Check out Politico’s latest “independent” news stories designed to scare readers and justify demands for increasingly large military equipment contracts to bolster the coffers of our leading arms manufacturers.
Notice anything new? This pro-war propaganda piece differs in that it honestly shows who bought and paid for it, and who really runs Politico’s newsroom.
At the very top of this scaremongering piece about Ukraine are the words: “Submitted by Lockheed Martin”.
What could be clearer than that. Wouldn’t you like the same refreshing honesty from all the other media outlets that suckle on the nipple of the military-industrial complex and distribute corporate press releases as if they were real independent news?
Since late March, Lockheed has been listed as a sponsor of Politico’s daily national security newsletter, a popular read among Washington’s foreign policy elite. In August, an article sponsored by Lockheed appeared under two advertisements for the F-35 fighter jet it produces.
The latest piece on Ukraine, which was removed on Tuesday after Tucker Carlson discussed the article on Fox News Channel, quoted a senior Republican House staffer as saying
“We’re facing an ‘Afghanistan in Europe’ type event with thousands dead, floodgates open for refugees and the credibility of the US undermined. It’s going to be terrible to watch.”
Terrible for everyone but Lockheed, which together with Raytheon is the co-manufacturer of the Javelin anti-tank missile, which the US has started supplying to Ukraine since 2018.
At that time, the Ukrainian government bought 210 missiles and 37 Javelin Command launchers, and then another 150 missiles and 10 launchers in 2020.
In October, the Biden administration sent another 30 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine as tensions with Russia escalated.
In a July poll, 50 per cent of Americans said they would support “the use of American troops if Russia invades the rest of Ukraine”, up from 30 per cent in 2014. This indicates that the reporting promoted by Lockheed in Politico is having an impact, even if it is distorted.
The truth doesn’t matter
Vice-Admiral Kay Achim Schönbach, head of the German Navy, said talk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine was “nonsense” and that Russia was simply seeking “respect” for its security in Europe.
The US has indeed been provoking Russia for years: since 2015, the CIA has secretly trained elite Ukrainian special forces units in firearms, camouflage techniques, ground navigation, “cover and movement” tactics and reconnaissance; the US has provided $2.4 billion in “security assistance” since supporting the 2014 anti-Russian coup – $450 million in 2021 alone.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov gleefully tweeted that a shipment of weapons had arrived from the US on 23 January, for the second time over the weekend. He said: “The second bird is in Kiev! Over 80 tonnes of weapons to strengthen Ukraine’s defence capability from our friends in the US! And it’s not over yet.”
None of this was reported in Politico.
When asked about the articles about Lockheed, a Politico spokesman responded as follows: “There is a strong firewall between POLITICO’s newsroom and its business teams. Thus, POLITICO’s sales department has no influence over editorial content and does not share information about advertisers with reporters and editors. Sponsorship advertising decisions are entirely at the advertiser’s discretion.” The insinuation was that the articles submitted by Lockheed were advertisements, although to the reader they appeared to be genuine news articles.
Return on investment
During the 2020 election cycle, Lockheed gave Biden’s campaign $447,047 (compared to Donald Trump’s $517,471).
The company received a significant return on its investment when Biden signed on to a 5 per cent increase in Trump’s defence budget in December, promising to spend $768.2 billion next year.
Lockheed had net sales of $67 billion in 2021, and its revenues have already risen this year.
In June, Lockheed announced that it was ready to offer Ukraine the F-16 Viper aircraft, which would be in high demand if war with Russia breaks out.
Last month, the Finnish Air Force announced it would buy 64 F-35A stealth fighters manufactured by Lockheed to replace its aging Boeing F/A-18 Hornets amid growing regional tensions.
In November, Lockheed struck a deal to sell Romania 12 S-70 Black Hawk helicopters.
It is also doing active business in Poland, another country on the front lines of the new Cold War, having signed an agreement in 2017 to sell it $250 million worth of highly mobile artillery rocket systems, guided missile systems, army tactical missile systems and related equipment.
An aggressive lobbying strategy
Lockheed’s sponsorship of articles in Politico is in line with an aggressive lobbying strategy dating back more than a decade.
In the mid-1990s, the US Committee on NATO Enlargement was founded by Bruce Jackson, Lockheed’s vice-president for strategy and planning, who also founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which advocated the US invasion in 2003.
Now the focus of Lockheed’s lobbying efforts and fear-mongering has become Russia and Ukraine, the subject of a number of articles featured in Politico.
One article in early January was titled “Inside Biden’s Secret Arms Supply to Ukraine”.
In it, the secret supply of US weapons to Ukraine was presented as necessary to save Ukraine from danger – the official line of the Biden administration.
The article’s co-author, Alex Ward, who also co-authored the last piece warning of a Russian invasion, was the associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center for International Security. The Atlantic Council, or “NATO’s de facto think tank”, is funded by Lockheed at $100,000 to $249,999 a year.
In the autumn, Lockheed “introduced” a series of articles in Politico, co-authored with Ward, criticising Biden’s misguided actions in withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.
Politico also published an article about Lockheed’s secret weapons factory in the California desert known as Skunk Works, which produced “the U-2 spy plane, which could – and still does – take pictures from 70,000 feet; the SR-71 Blackbird, an aircraft that could fly at over Mach 3; and the F-117 Nighthawk, the first stealth fighter”.
The author of the article, Lee Hudson, wrote that “for journalists writing about defence technology and aviation nerds”, a special invitation to tour the facility was “the equivalent of a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory”. However, Hudson later admitted that the true purpose of the visit was “to try to win support for more Pentagon businesses amid a low defence budget”.
Politico was founded in 2007 by two former Washington Post reporters, John F. Harris and Jim Vandehey, to focus on politics with fast internet reporting.
Since then, the magazine has grown considerably in readership and maintained a good reputation, so its transformation into a propaganda organ of a leading death merchant is particularly worrying.
Conventional magazine
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