There was no funeral. There was no ceremony of any kind, really. Over 11 years ago, on Friday, November 1, 2013, a valuable source of information and current news was put to rest without fanfare or much of any mention. What had been, for 65 years, hands down, the most read document in the Pentagon, perhaps across the military, was simply stopped. As is so often pointed out, nature abhors a vacuum. Over the intervening years, the media conglomerate Sightline Media Group has replaced the original Early Bird each weekday morning with a news aggregation sporting a slightly different name, Defense News’ Early Bird Brief. Others, like Real Clear Defense also provide a single source for a variety of articles on current national security topics.
The Pentagon News Digest Ended Abruptly
As President Donald Trump continues the campaign to return the US Military to an armed force focused on lethality and readiness, having a news feed touching a large number of military men and women with current information on the commander-in-chief’s vision is essential. There was a time when an internal Pentagon news digest did that. The chief of the Department of Defense press office, Col. Steve Warren, decided to close the Early Bird distribution in 2013 because, as he explained, “’It had become too big.”
“It had become too powerful [more than a million readers], and I believe it had a tendency to take a small story and purely by accident turn it into a crisis,” Warren told the LA Times in 2013.
Ok, the Early Bird was a little clunky and not always segmented into topic categories, certainly not the slick online news digests that replaced it. Yet it was important because the Pentagon’s press office staff chose the content. These folks knew the issues du jour and focused on those. That emphasis on specific topics of interest inside the Pentagon encouraged media outlets to gather news and information on those topics. As the New York Times explained in its Early Bird epitaph:
“The Early Bird could trace its beginnings to 1948 when postwar news-clipping services became common across the military. They were consolidated in the 1960s in what became known as the Yellow Bird: the top page was canary yellow, designed to stand out on desks piled with papers. It became an official effort of the Defense Department’s public affairs office in 1989.”
Sometime after transmission of the clips became electronic, the first page was no longer yellow, and the moniker Early Bird stuck. The importance of the daily document to the education of the Defense Department leadership cannot be overstated. The Bird was the first must-read for decision-makers inside the five-sided building. Executive officers would get the document from the FAX machine or, in more recent years, as an email and quickly read through the articles, highlighting those particularly relevant for their bosses. Simply put, it was a ritual that kept all the Pentagon executives informed uniformly.
However, taking Warren’s notion that the Bird inflated the importance of stories into larger than they deserve, its replacement is equally guilty. A recent Defense News Early Bird Brief carried a BBC article, “’A mockery’: Trump’s new meme-coin sparks anger in crypto world,” which begs the question, what does this have to do with US national security or defense? What it does do is cast the new Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump, in a less than flattering light.
To be fair, it’s easy to go through any aggregator’s selection of articles and find those with which you disagree. What makes the Defense News’ Early Bird Brief different is that it has a target audience of millions of members of the US military, Defense Department leadership, foreign defense officials, and defense contractors. The magnitude and diversity of its readership drives its influence. Often, finding alternative points of view requires these readers to do their own article searches. The Early Bird Brief plays on its accessibility and convenience.
With the plethora of online news resources, some focusing on defense and foreign policy, having an internal Pentagon news clipping service is a belt and suspenders excess. Nonetheless, the value of having the staff of the Pentagon Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs running the effort would have an advantage that outside sources do not. The Pentagon press office has insight into the driving issues of the day inside the building. Having daily information addressing those issues would have thematic and timeliness value.
The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.
