Rendon Group Thrown Out With Bathwater
I’m of two minds about The Rendon Group losing their contract to provide the US military with background on reporters who request embeds.
On the one hand, I despise opaqueness of any kind in government. The fact the military denied they were creating these reports is very disturbing. Additionally, a number of reporters contacted me over the weekend saying they asked Rendon for copies of their own reports and were flatly refused. This is ridiculous. Any agency (besides intelligence organs) working on behalf of the US government should be as transparent as possible, especially a company that is putting together creepy background files on journalists. Why wouldn’t Rendon give up the reports? What are they afraid of?
Yet I think the military should have some way of evaluating journalists who will be in intimate proximity to soldiers. Soldiers risk their lives on dangerous and sometimes sensitive missions. Reporters should absolutely have access to this world, but the military deserves to know what kind of journalist it is taking on when accepting an embed.
The military loves to reduce people and situations to shorthand phrases or (better yet) acronyms. The Rendon ratings classified reporters in the kind of simple, black-and-white terms that commanders are used to dealing with. To military brass, these reports weren’t creepy, they were S.O.P. With Rendon gone, these briefs disappear and the Army loses a tool that it was comfortable using.
That said, many commenters on this post suggested the obvious: Couldn’t the US military do these background reports and cut out the middleman? Of course they could and now they probably will.
But don’t think that just because Rendon is out of the picture, certain reporters who cover the military in ways the brass doesn’t like are going to suddenly get better access.
The best we can hope for is that when these reporters ask for whatever documents or reports the military has on them, commanders respond with transparency, rather than blundering half-truths.
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Mr. Tobia,
As you can tell from the name I’ve chosen, I enjoy gaining additional website passwords about as much as an IRS audit, impacted wisdom tooth, and third breast.
My complaint so noted, and my acknowledgment of this site’s need for some sort of screening method accepted and recognized, you just picked up a new reader.
Anyone with enough sense and connections to score a copy of his own Rendon biography deserves more readership. You’ve got me, kid. Don’t lose me.
Just do good work. Solid, accurate, factual journalism. No gotcha garbage. No angling for synergy or a spot on the cable blowhard festivals. Just keep doing the fine reporting that you’re doing.
Nothing more is needed. Nothing less will be accepted.
As to your postulate that the Army’s ditching of Rendon meaning that it’s also scrapped the pre-screening of its scribes, I can only type, “Whoa, son!” There are plenty of lobbying firms in D.C. and elsewhere capable, able, and all too willing to become the next Rendon, to fill the vacancy created by its exile. In fact, I’d bet you an iced coffee (black, very little ice) that the Pentagon already had two or three operations warming up in the bullpen to replace Rendon when and if necessary.
So just because Rendon has hit the road does NOT mean that the Pentagon has discarded its review of journalists. As anyone who knows the Pentagon will tell you, it’s impossible to get anything out of that operation – four walls and a spare, a monument to Murphy’s Law – once it’s set up shop inside. Ideas or armaments, it doesn’t matter; if the Pentagonians have embraced it, they won’t let it go. Just wrap it up in a new package and wait.
That’s where the money is.