GOP Shills Offer Newspapers Free Reports From Iraq

A great bit of connect-the-dots reporting by News National's Jerry Zremski looks at the deep GOP ties that lie behind a pro-war group that are offering their services to newspapers as imbedded reporters in Iraq and freelance op-ed writers.

The group, Vets for Freedom, has already had a memorial day op-ed in the New York Times that was widely quoted by rightwing pundits.

But...

Their spokesman, the one who approached newspapers on their behalf, is former White House spokeman Taylor Gross, who worked under Press Secretary Scott McClellan until last year.

Gross now works for consulting and PR firm the Herald Group, which he formed with other Republican operatives, Matt Well and Doug McGinn. They "tout their GOP background" on their website. Herald Group has been hired by Vets For Freedom to do its PR work after "volunteering" for the job.

One of the two reporters Vets For Freedom has imbedded in Iraq is former Marine Lt. Wade Zirkle. He was also a a regional field director for Republican Jerry Kilgore's 2005 campaign for governor of Virginia.

The other is David Bellavia, he "attended President Bush's 2006 State of the Union address as a guest of Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, (R-Clarence)".

Another of the consulting firms the group has hired is Campaign Solutions, "a well-known consulting group that lists several Republican clients on its Web site. Zirkle said he hired Campaign Solutions because he was familiar with its work from the Kilgore campaign".

Vets For Freedom's website is hosted by the same company that "previously worked for the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee".

Experts on ethical journalism were horrified:

If a news organization had spent any time vetting this, I doubt that anyone would have taken them up on it," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a highly regarded journalism training center in St. Petersburg, Fla. McBride said the embedding effort appears to have "a very strong relationship" with Republican activists.

...Told of Gross' effort to place stories in the mainstream media, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, John Stauber, said: "You can't find a link much closer to the administration than this one."

Yet Vets for Freedom insist they are not a GOP front in any way.

"I worked for President Bush, and I'm proud to have done so," Gross said. "But Vets for Freedom is a nonpartisan group. If one wants to classify it as pro-mission, that would be accurate."

Coincidence? Well all four newspapers they approached to carry their imbed reports - the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Buffalo News and the Richmond Times-Dispatch - reportedly turned them down so I suppose a lot will be said by where their reports do eventually turn up.

Expect to see their glowing tales of how clean the streets of Baghdad are in places like FrontPage, National Review Online and American Daily any day now.