The U.S. military in Iraq has issued a $20 million, two-year contract to provide what they see as an essential service: a public relations program that seeks to “promote more positive coverage of news” from the region.

The proposed project will vet existing news stories, assessing whether or not they portray U.S. actions in a positive light; the list of news sources that will be monitored is extensive, including sources from Iraq itself as well as U.S. and Middle Eastern media outlets.

The program aims to target news stories that deal with key areas of coalition activities in Iraq — such as reconstruction efforts and security — and analyze their content. Stories will be judged on their tone, as well as their ability to disseminate what military leaders decide are “key themes and messages.”

The U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) already has a program for providing news to selected weblogs and watching what is being said about its activities in Iraq and Afghanistan in the blogosphere.

As The Washington Post noted Thursday, these developments are only one aspect of the current administration’s concerns over press coverage; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for example, has repeatedly expressed his worries that stories about Iraq focus too heavily on potentially embarrassing news of coalition activities and ignore or downplay any positives. On Tuesday, Rumsfeld reiterated these concerns, citing a search of leading U.S. newspapers, which apparently revealed that a U.S. soldier punished for misconduct was written about “10 times” as often as the first soldier to be awarded the Medal of Honor for anti-terrorism activities.

Many critics of the proposal have voiced concerns that the program will distort the U.S. public’s perceptions of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. By promoting a positive image of the conflict — regardless of reality — the U.S. government is essentially funding a propaganda machine, attempting to convince the U.S. public of successes that do not exist and sweeping failures under the carpet.

Although these actions will not censor the media per se, they are indicative of an increasingly media-savvy military. One public relations expert commented that programs such as these show that military commanders “are overwhelmed by the media . . . [and] are trying to understand how to get their information out”; in short, military commanders want the US public to hear their truth, and only their truth — without that pesky free press getting in the way.