To my way of thinking DoD Public Affairs and Information Operations ought to be based on facts, not upon gross exaggerations or fabrications. To the extent that they have a slant it should be in the area of themes, that we're wearing the white hats and the other side is not.

Perhaps it was too long ago and in the last century for this to be of any relevance, but in 1945 my late Dad helped to write, edit, and design this pocket booklet that G.I.s could send home to their families:



That was in the days before PAO was a term -- I believe it was then called public relations. In Dad's case it was a provisional office formed under the division G-2. (To an extent the division intel officers dual-tracked the guys -- Dad was occasionally the G-2's jeep driver.) As for journalistic objectivity, they wrote stories that cast the division in a favorable light, but to my knowledge did not make things up; on the other hand if the commander of Company B of the XXX Infantry was relieved for cause they didn't write anything about it. One of Dad's stories from Occupation Japan was on how rural citizens had buried the bodies from a shot-down B-29 with the same dignity they would have shown to their own guys. The story he wrote as an E-4 was published by the New York Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, not too bad for a kid of 20.