Please excuse my intemperence here but I feel the need to rant a bit.

The television media has become centralized it is true under corporate consolidation but that has hardly altered the political -cultural cast of newsrooms and editorial boards which remain moderately left of center on average. As I see it, we have two unrelated problems here:

1. The MSM is intellectually homogenized with a distinct " herd mentality" of people of a certain outlook and big journalism school background that produces largely superficial reporting that jams all events into the 100 year old Pulitzerian news frame. For more on this see Paul H. Weaver's _News and the Culture of Lying_.

2. That being said, the USG has no Strategic Influence policy worthy of the name. To call our efforts in the war of ideas incompetent would be to cast a slur on incompetents everywhere. The merely incompetent simply shoot themselves in the foot - of late, we lobb grenades at the enemy and manage to blow off our own genitals on live global television. Repeatedly.

A short list of problems that come to mind just off of the top of my head:

No setting of strategic information objectives by the POTUS through the NSC.

No coordination of military and civilian agencies in terms of message discipline. Or within either the military OR the civilian agencies. In short, no information " jointness". Four plus years into a war, no less.

No process by which to methodically identify the multiple audiences that each message is going to reach and how they will perceive it.

Little effort to differentiate intellectually between public diplomacy, covert influence and pure disinformation operations. For that matter, no consideration of how our own disinformation is blowing back at us via the MSM !

An inability to craft messages with an a priori comprehension of the target audience worldview so that our message is culturally relevant and persuasive.

Insufficient linguistic capacity to interpret the OODA loop for information warfare.

Investment in media that is not perceived by the target audience as credible or independent (i.e. al-Hurra comes across as a transparent shill unlike the VOA and Radio Free Europe during the Cold War).

I could go on.

Our opponents are guys who glory in ghoulishly beheading people. The fact that we are having trouble pulling even with them is an indictment of our efforts. Yes, the MSM is unhelpful but we do not have our act together.