Propaganda? Do I care?

I was listening to CBC this morning and they were interviewing a former employee of the Lincoln Group, a contractor in Iraq and elsewhere touting itself as a "strategic communications and public relations firm providing insight and influence in challenging and hostile environments".

The gentleman being interviewed said that news media in Iraq is, essentially, for hire. The Lincoln Group would receive "storyboards" (read: articles) from the U.S. Military. They would then transmit those storyboards to Iraqi journalists along with a certain sum of cash. The journalists would then see that the "storyboard" got published in whichever newspaper he worked for.

Now, my sensibilities about a free press and all that were initially offended at the idea that my government was paying to have propaganda published in Iraq. Then, I sat back and thought about it. I've come to some tentative conclusions:

1. If these newspapers are taking money from the U.S. Military, they will likely take it from anyone - propaganda runs both ways, after all.
2. Would the reporting be fair and unbiased if these papers were left to their own devices in Iraq, an environment permeated with terror? Probably not.
3. Having spent decades under the regime of Saddam Hussein who controlled all the media in Iraq, do Iraqis have a healthy suspicion that not everything they read in the paper is absolute truth? Probably.
   

So, I say keep the propaganda flowing. No doubt it's keeping some newspaper men (and women?) in food and clothes and it's probably not doing any real damage.