Filtering The Front Lines, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

Rendon gets nixed:

The U.S. military is canceling its contract with a controversial private firm that was producing background profiles of journalists seeking to cover the war that graded their past work as “positive,” “negative” or “neutral,” Stars and Stripes has learned. [...] The announcement follows a week of revelations by Stars and Stripes in which military public affairs officers who served in Afghanistan said that as recently as 2008 they had used reporter profiles compiled by The Rendon Group, a private public relations firm in Washington, D.C., to decide whether to grant permission to embed with troops on the battlefield.

In a week when WaPo gives cover to torture apologists and Chris Wallace massages Cheney's messaging, it's especially gratifying to see that some people are still doing good journalism (and, in this case, enabling even more good journalism). Well done, Kevin Baron, Charlie Reed, Leo Shane III, and everyone else at Stars and Stripes.