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5.
Pravda, U.S.A. - the Age of GOP Propaganda
5.1 Propaganda Media
In order to separate out media behavior that gives the *appearance*
of propaganda from overtly propagandistic behavior, only the
following types of propaganda are covered here:
- Running "news" items which are pure propaganda,
without letting viewers/readers know that it is (e.g., who
the source of the "news" is)
- A willingness to push talking points or propaganda for a
particular political party without disclosing to
viewers/readers/listeners (ahead-of-time) that one is a paid or
unpaid consultant to that same party
- Considering their Dear Leader's love
of propaganda (and dislike
of exposes of his paid propagandists), conservatives in the
mainstream media unsurprisingly "win" hands down on
the topic of propaganda. Any media organization that tolerates this behavior
(or ignores it) clearly
indicates its willingness to also serve as a propaganda arm.
Indeed, when one of CNN's co-founders, Reese Schonfeld, actively
supports government lying and media cover-ups of
Government misbehavior (truly un-American, and the opposite of
liberalism and far more in line with today's so-called conservatism), it is not surprising that there
are
others in his midst who feel similarly.
- Actively pushing for overt, one-sided partisan propaganda (talking
points) without seeking even a semblance of balance
I intentionally exclude cases where the news coverage or media
behavior was propagandistic in effect but may not have been intentionally
propagandistic. The main reason for this is that what is propaganda in
effect is to some extent subjective.
The cases listed below are what I have been able to collect thus
far from blogs and Google searches. They demonstrate a willingness of
the mainstream media (ICM)
(or journalists/columnists employed by the media) to serve as a
propaganda organ of the GOP, far more than any such willingness to
serve as a propaganda organ for liberals or Democrats. (As CorpWatch
points out, the Bush administration spent almost twice as much on
propaganda PR pieces than did the Clinton administration; also see this
blog post).
5.1.1 Bush Department
of Health and Human Services (Medicare) fake news videos
5.1.2 Bush Department
of Education fake news videos
5.1.3 Bush State Department and fake news videos
5.1.4 Bush Transportation Security Department and
fake news videos
5.1.5 Bush Agriculture Department and fake news
videos
5.1.6 Bush Defense Department and fake news videos
5.1.7 Bush Office of National Drug Control Policy
and fake news videos
5.1.8 Other Bush administration departments and
fake news videos
5.1.9 Armstrong
Williams and the Bush Department of Education
5.1.10 Maggie
Gallagher and the Bush Department of Health and Human Services
5.1.11 Michael McManus
- the self-described ethics expert - and the Bush Department of Health
and Human Services
5.1.12 Charles
Krauthammer (Washington Post/Fox News) and the Bush White House
5.1.13 California GOP Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger and his fake news videos
5.1.14 Mike Vasilinda and Florida's GOP Governor Jeb
Bush's administration
5.1.15 Charles Chieppo and Massachusetts' GOP
Governor Mitt Romney's administration
5.1.16 Andrea Engleman and Rep. Jim Gibbons
(R-NV)
5.1.17 Clear Channel
and George Bush ("Our Leader")
5.1.18 Fox News and
the Bush administration/GOP
5.1.19 Sinclair Broadcasting
APPENDIX
(covers Jeff Gannon/Talon
News and Rush Limbaugh)
5.1.1
Bush Department of Health and Human Services (Medicare) fake news
videos
Amy Goldstein reported this
in the Washington Post:
The Bush administration violated two
federal laws through part of its publicity campaign to promote
changes in Medicare intended to help older Americans afford
prescription drugs, the investigative arm of Congress said
yesterday.
The General Accounting Office
concluded that the Department of Health and Human Services illegally
spent federal money on what amounted to covert propaganda by
producing videos about the Medicare changes that were made to look
like news reports. Portions of the videos, which have been aired by
40 television stations around the country, do not make it clear that
the announcers were paid by HHS and were not real reporters.
...
The 16-page legal opinion says that HHS's "video news
releases" violated a statute that forbids the use of federal
money for propaganda, as well as the Antideficiency Act, which
covers the unauthorized use of federal funds.
...
Two weeks ago, the Congressional Research Service concluded that the
administration potentially violated the law in a related matter, in
which the Medicare program's chief actuary has said he was
threatened with firing a year ago if he shared with Congress cost
estimates that the Medicare legislation would be a third more
expensive than the $400 billion Bush said it would cost.
...
The GAO objected to one part of the videos that were sent to TV
stations this year. Each of the videos consists of three sections:
video clips, information about the Medicare law and a segment called
a "story package," which appears to be a news report. It
is that last part that the GAO found illegal.
The English-language version of the story package concludes with a
woman saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."
The Spanish version has the same ending but shows a man who
identifies himself as Alberto Garcia.
Pierce said the videos are not misleading because television
stations know they had been produced by the government and because
the stations are free to combine parts of the government-produced
material with original reporting.
But the GAO decision said the story packages ran afoul of the law
forbidding federal spending on covert propaganda because "in
each news report, the content was attributed to an individual
purporting to be a reporter but actually hired by an HHS
subcontractor."
5.1.2
Bush Department of Education fake news videos
AP/ABC
(note the passage I have emphasized in bold):
The Bush administration has promoted
its education law with a video that comes across as a news story but
fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer
money.
The government used a similar
approach this year in promoting the new Medicare law and drew a
rebuke from the investigative arm of Congress, which found the
videos amounted to propaganda in violation of federal law.
The Education Department also has
paid for rankings of newspaper coverage of the No Child Left Behind
law, a centerpiece of the president's domestic agenda. Points are
awarded for stories that say President Bush and the Republican Party
are strong on education, among other factors.
The news ratings also rank individual
reporters on how they cover the law, based on the points system set
up by Ketchum, a public relations firm hired by the government.
The video and documents emerged
through a Freedom of Information Act request by People for the
American Way, a liberal group that contends the department is
spending public money on a political agenda. The group sought
details on a $700,000 contract Ketchum received in 2003 from the
Education Department.
One service the company provided was
a video news release geared for television stations. The video
includes a news story that features Education Secretary Rod Paige
and promotes tutoring now offered under law.
The story ends with the voice of a
woman saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting."
It does not identify the government
as the source of the report. It also fails to make clear the person
purporting to be a reporter was someone hired for the promotional
video.
Those are the same features including
the voice of Karen Ryan that were prominent in videos the Health and
Human Services Department used to promote the Medicare law and were
judged covert propaganda by the Government Accountability Office in
May.
...
At least one television station in New York used the package
in 2003, substituting its own reporter for the voiceover but
following the script and video provided by the department. The
department, in turn, put the text of that station's story on its Web
site.
5.1.3 Bush State
Department and fake news videos
David
Barstow and Robin Stein report in the New York Times:
It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant
Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about
reaction to the fall of Baghdad.
...
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on
the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three.
The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department.
...
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has
aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the
prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have
long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache
remedies to auto insurance.
...
Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin
of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves,
though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news
broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not
to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their
reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the
government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of
broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.
....
Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest
television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas
and Atlanta.
...
Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government
Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies
the federal government and its expenditures, has held that
government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert
propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the
television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers
know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O.
said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports
"that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television
viewing audience that the agency was the source of those
materials."
...
Afghanistan to Memphis: An Agency's Report Ends Up on the
Air
On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how
assistance from the United States was helping to liberate the women
of Afghanistan.
Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once
barred from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their
burkas, taking up jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters
off to new schools, receiving decent medical care for the first time
and even participating in a fledgling democracy. Her segment
included an interview with an Afghan teacher who recounted how the
Taliban only allowed boys to attend school. An Afghan doctor
described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians treat
women.
In short, Ms. Clark's report seemed to corroborate, however
modestly, a central argument of the Bush foreign policy, that
forceful American intervention abroad was spreading freedom,
improving lives and winning friends.
What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the
interviews used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department
contractors. The contractors also selected the quotes used from
those interviews and shot the video that went with the narration.
They also wrote the narration, much of which Ms. Clark repeated with
only minor changes.
As it happens, the viewers of WHBQ were not the only ones in the
dark.
Ms. Clark, now Tish Clark Dunning, said in an interview that she,
too, had no idea the report originated at the State Department.
"If that's true, I'm very shocked that anyone would false
report on anything like that," she said.
How a television reporter in Memphis unwittingly came to narrate
a segment by the State Department reveals much about the extent to
which government-produced news accounts have seeped into the broader
new media landscape.
The explanation begins inside the White House, where the
president's communications advisers devised a strategy after Sept.
11, 2001, to encourage supportive news coverage of the fight against
terrorism. The idea, they explained to reporters at the time, was to
counter charges of American imperialism by generating accounts that
emphasized American efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and
Iraq.
An important instrument of this strategy was the Office of
Broadcasting Services, a State Department unit of 30 or so editors
and technicians whose typical duties include distributing video from
news conferences. But in early 2002, with close editorial direction
from the White House, the unit began producing narrated feature
reports, many of them promoting American achievements in Afghanistan
and Iraq and reinforcing the administration's rationales for the
invasions. These reports were then widely distributed in the United
States and around the world for use by local television stations. In
all, the State Department has produced 59 such segments.
United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the
domestic dissemination of government propaganda. The 1948 Smith-Mundt
Act, for example, allows Voice of America to broadcast
pro-government news to foreign audiences, but not at home. Yet State
Department officials said that law does not apply to the Office of
Broadcasting Services. In any event, said Richard A. Boucher, a
State Department spokesman: "Our goal is to put out facts and
the truth. We're not a propaganda agency."
Even so, as a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told
Congress last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such
"good news" segments as "powerful strategic
tools" for influencing public opinion. And a review of the
department's segments reveals a body of work in sync with the
political objectives set forth by the White House communications
team after 9/11.
In June 2003, for example, the unit produced a segment that
depicted American efforts to distribute food and water to the people
of southern Iraq. "After living for decades in fear, they are
now receiving assistance - and building trust - with their coalition
liberators," the unidentified narrator concluded.
Several segments focused on the liberation of Afghan women, which
a White House memo from January 2003 singled out as a "prime
example" of how "White House-led efforts could facilitate
strategic, proactive communications in the war on terror."
Tracking precisely how a "good news" report on
Afghanistan could have migrated to Memphis from the State Department
is far from easy. The State Department typically distributes its
segments via satellite to international news organizations like
Reuters and Associated Press Television News, which in turn
distribute them to the major United States networks, which then
transmit them to local affiliates.
"Once these products leave our hands, we have no
control," Robert A. Tappan, the State Department's deputy
assistant secretary for public affairs, said in an interview. The
department, he said, never intended its segments to be shown
unedited and without attribution by local news programs. "We do
our utmost to identify them as State Department-produced
products."
Representatives for the networks insist that government-produced
reports are clearly labeled when they are distributed to affiliates.
Yet with segments bouncing from satellite to satellite, passing from
one news organization to another, it is easy to see the potential
for confusion. Indeed, in response to questions from The Times,
Associated Press Television News acknowledged that they might have
distributed at least one segment about Afghanistan to the major
United States networks without identifying it as the product of the
State Department. A spokesman said it could have "slipped
through our net because of a sourcing error."
Kenneth W. Jobe, vice president for news at WHBQ in Memphis, said
he could not explain how his station came to broadcast the State
Department's segment on Afghan women. "It's the same piece,
there's no mistaking it," he said in an interview, insisting
that it would not happen again.
Mr. Jobe, who was not with WHBQ in 2002, said the station's
script for the segment has no notes explaining its origin. But Tish
Clark Dunning said it was her impression at the time that the Afghan
segment was her station's version of one done first by network
correspondents at either Fox News or CNN. It is not unusual, she
said, for a local station to take network reports and then give them
a hometown look.
"I didn't actually go to Afghanistan," she said.
"I took that story and reworked it. I had to do some research
on my own. I remember looking on the Internet and finding out how it
all started as far as women covering their faces and
everything."
At the State Department, Mr. Tappan said the broadcasting office
is moving away from producing narrated feature segments. Instead,
the department is increasingly supplying only the ingredients for
reports
5.1.4 Bush
Transportation Security Department and fake news videos
David
Barstow and Robin Stein report in the New York Times:
It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant
Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about
reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of
"another success" in the Bush administration's "drive
to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it
"one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation
history."
...
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on
the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all
three....The "reporter" covering airport safety was
actually a public relations professional working under a false name
for the Transportation Security Administration.
...
5.1.5 Bush Agriculture
Department and fake news videos
David
Barstow and Robin Stein report in the New York Times:
It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
...A third segment, broadcast in January, described the
administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment
on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all
three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department.
The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a
public relations professional working under a false name for the
Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done
by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
...
Meeting a Need: Rising Budget Pressures, Ready-to-Run
Segments
WCIA is a small station with a big job in central Illinois.
Each weekday, WCIA's news department produces a three-hour
morning program, a noon broadcast and three evening programs. There
are plans to add a 9 p.m. broadcast. The staff, though, has been cut
to 37 from 39. "We are doing more with the same," said Jim
P. Gee, the news director.
Farming is crucial in Mr. Gee's market, yet with so many demands,
he said, "it is hard for us to justify having a reporter just
focusing on agriculture."
To fill the gap, WCIA turned to the Agriculture Department, which
has assembled one of the most effective public relations operations
inside the federal government. The department has a Broadcast Media
and Technology Center with an annual budget of $3.2 million that
each year produces some 90 "mission messages" for local
stations - mostly feature segments about the good works of the
Agriculture Department.
"I don't want to use the word 'filler,' per se, but they
meet a need we have," Mr. Gee said.
The Agriculture Department's two full-time reporters, Bob Ellison
and Pat O'Leary, travel the country filing reports, which are vetted
by the department's office of communications before they are
distributed via satellite and mail. Alisa Harrison, who oversees the
communications office, said Mr. Ellison and Mr. O'Leary provide
unbiased, balanced and accurate coverage.
"They cover the secretary just like any other
reporter," she said.
Invariably, though, their segments offer critic-free accounts of
the department's policies and programs. In one report, Mr. Ellison
told of the agency's efforts to help Florida clean up after several
hurricanes.
''They've done a fantastic job,'' a grateful local official said
in the segment.
More recently, Mr. Ellison reported that Mike Johanns, the new
agriculture secretary, and the White House were determined to reopen
Japan to American beef products. Of his new boss, Mr. Ellison
reported, ''He called Bush the best envoy in the world.''
WCIA, based in Champaign, has run 26 segments made by the
Agriculture Department over the past three months alone. Or put
another way, WCIA has run 26 reports that did not cost it anything
to produce.
Mr. Gee, the news director, readily acknowledges that these
accounts are not exactly independent, tough-minded journalism. But,
he added: ''We don't think they're propaganda. They meet our
journalistic standards. They're informative. They're balanced.''
More than a year ago, WCIA asked the Agriculture Department to
record a special sign-off that implies the segments are the work of
WCIA reporters. So, for example, instead of closing his report with
''I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for the U.S.D.A.,'' Mr. Ellison says,
''With the U.S.D.A., I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for 'The Morning
Show.'''
Mr. Gee said the customized sign-off helped raise ''awareness of
the name of our station.'' Could it give viewers the idea that Mr.
Ellison is reporting on location with the U.S.D.A. for WCIA? ''We
think viewers can make up their own minds,'' Mr. Gee said.
Ms. Harrison, the Agriculture Department press secretary, said
the WCIA sign-off was an exception. The general policy, she said, is
to make clear in each segment that the reporter works for the
department. In any event, she added, she did not think there was
much potential for viewer confusion. ''It's pretty clear to me,''
she said.
5.1.6 Bush Defense
Department and fake news videos
David
Barstow and Robin Stein report in the New York Times:
The 'Good News' People: A Menu of Reports From Military
Hot Spots
The Defense Department is working hard to produce and distribute
its own news segments for television audiences in the United States.
The Pentagon Channel, available only inside the Defense
Department last year, is now being offered to every cable and
satellite operator in the United States. Army public affairs
specialists, equipped with portable satellite transmitters, are
roaming war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, beaming news reports, raw
video and interviews to TV stations in the United States. All a
local news director has to do is log on to a military-financed Web
site, www.dvidshub.net, browse a menu of segments and request a free
satellite feed.
Then there is the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service, a
unit of 40 reporters and producers set up to send local stations
news segments highlighting the accomplishments of military members.
''We're the 'good news' people,'' said Larry W. Gilliam, the
unit's deputy director.
Each year, the unit films thousands of soldiers sending holiday
greetings to their hometowns. Increasingly, the unit also produces
news reports that reach large audiences. The 50 stories it filed
last year were broadcast 236 times in all, reaching 41 million
households in the United States.
The news service makes it easy for local stations to run its
segments unedited. Reporters, for example, are never identified by
their military titles. ''We know if we put a rank on there they're
not going to put it on their air,'' Mr. Gilliam said.
Each account is also specially tailored for local broadcast. A
segment sent to a station in Topeka, Kan., would include an
interview with a service member from there. If the same report is
sent to Oklahoma City, the soldier is switched out for one from
Oklahoma City. ''We try to make the individual soldier a star in
their hometown,'' Mr. Gilliam said, adding that segments were
distributed only to towns and cities selected by the service members
interviewed.
Few stations acknowledge the military's role in the segments.
''Just tune in and you'll see a minute-and-a-half news piece and it
looks just like they went out and did the story,'' Mr. Gilliam said.
The unit, though, makes no attempt to advance any particular
political or policy agenda, he said.
''We don't editorialize at all,'' he said.
Yet sometimes the ''good news'' approach carries political
meaning, intended or not. Such was the case after the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal surfaced last spring. Although White House officials
depicted the abuse of Iraqi detainees as the work of a few rogue
soldiers, the case raised serious questions about the training of
military police officers.
A short while later, Mr. Gilliam's unit distributed a news
segment, sent to 34 stations, that examined the training of prison
guards at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where some of the military
police officers implicated at Abu Ghraib had been trained.
''One of the most important lessons they learn is to treat
prisoners strictly but fairly,'' the reporter said in the segment,
which depicted a regimen emphasizing respect for detainees. A
trainer told the reporter that military police officers were taught
to ''treat others as they would want to be treated.'' The account
made no mention of Abu Ghraib or how the scandal had prompted
changes in training at Fort Leonard Wood.
According to Mr. Gilliam, the report was unrelated to any effort
by the Defense Department to rebut suggestions of a broad command
failure.
''Are you saying that the Pentagon called down and said, 'We need
some good publicity?''' he asked. ''No, not at all.''
5.1.7 Bush Office of
National Drug Control Policy and fake news videos
Ceci
Connolly (Washington Post):
Shortly before last year's Super Bowl, local news stations across
the country aired a story by Mike Morris describing plans for a new
White House ad campaign on the dangers of drug abuse.
What viewers did not know was that Morris is not a journalist and
his "report" was produced by the government, actions that
constituted illegal "covert propaganda," according to an
investigation by the Government Accountability Office.
In the second ruling of its kind, the investigative arm of
Congress this week scolded the Bush administration for distributing
phony prepackaged news reports that include a "suggested live
intro" for anchors to read, interviews with Washington
officials and a closing that mimics a typical broadcast news sign
off.
Although television stations knew the materials were produced by
the Office of National Drug Control Policy, there was nothing in the
two-minute, prepackaged reports that would indicate to viewers that
they came from the government or that Morris, a former journalist,
was working under contract for the government.
"You think you are getting a news story, but what you are
getting is a paid announcement," said Susan A. Poling, managing
associate general counsel at the GAO. "What is objectionable
about these is the fact the viewer has no idea their tax dollars are
being used to write and produce this video segment."
...
In one video, titled "Urging Parents to Get the Facts
Straight on Teen Marijuana Use," news stations were provided a
script for the news anchor. It reads: "Despite the fact that
marijuana is the most widely used illicit drug among today's youth,
many parents admit they're still not taking the drug seriously. Now,
the nation's experts in health, education and safety have joined the
Drug Czar to speak directly to parents about the very real risks of
teen marijuana use. Mike Morris has more."
After interview snippets with John Walters, who heads the drug
control policy office, and other experts, the story closes with the
voiceover: "This is Mike Morris reporting."
In another, the announcer appears to be "reporting" on
a news conference by drug control officials, when "in reality,
they are just paid to say a script," Poling said. "In
essence, they're actors."
The drug control agency distributed at least seven prepackaged
news reports to 770 TV stations. At least 300 news shows used some
portion of the materials, though it was impossible to determine how
many aired the full prepackaged story or just portions such as
"sound bites," Riley said.
If the videos had been identified as coming from the federal
agency, that would have been legal, Poling said. But the television
package looks like authentic independent journalism.
5.1.8 Other Bush
administration departments and fake news videos
David
Barstow and Robin Stein report in the New York Times:
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has
aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the
prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have
long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache
remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies,
including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made
and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past
four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently
broadcast on local stations across the country without any
acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a
handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies
without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government.
But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage
have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the
same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or
negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards
that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any
outside group without revealing the source.
Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the
origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves,
though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news
broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not
to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their
reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the
government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of
broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.
Some reports were produced to support the administration's most
cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare
reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the
administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its
campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve
forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its
attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature
"interviews" with senior administration officials in which
questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are
excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.
Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest
television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas
and Atlanta.
An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look
inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations
and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce
prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by
public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced
reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web
portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge
cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism.
It is also a world where all participants benefit.
Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original
material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth
millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the
releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce
segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration,
meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of
traditional reporting.
The practice, which also occurred in the Clinton administration,
is continuing despite President Bush's recent call for a clearer
demarcation between journalism and government publicity efforts.
"There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the
White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January,
explaining why his administration would no longer pay pundits to
support his policies.
In interviews, though, press officers for several federal
agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to
government-made television news segments, also known as video news
releases. They described the segments as factual, politically
neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no
similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative
columnist who promoted the administration's chief education
initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing
$240,000 in payments from the Education Department.
What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of
television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the
government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the
television stations that ran it without attribution," said
William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human
Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held
responsible for their actions."
Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government
Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies
the federal government and its expenditures, has held that
government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert
propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the
television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers
know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O.
said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports
"that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television
viewing audience that the agency was the source of those
materials."
It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements
will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies
have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And
on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and
Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch
agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the
G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and
"purely informational" news segments made by the
government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum
said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed
to viewers.
Even if agencies do disclose their role, those efforts can easily
be undone in a broadcaster's editing room. Some news organizations,
for example, simply identify the government's "reporter"
as one of their own and then edit out any phrase suggesting the
segment was not of their making.
So in a recent segment produced by the Agriculture Department,
the agency's narrator ended the report by saying "In Princess
Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary reporting for the U.S. Department of
Agriculture." Yet AgDay, a syndicated farm news program that is
shown on some 160 stations, simply introduced the segment as being
by "AgDay's Pat O'Leary." The final sentence was then
trimmed to "In Princess Anne, Maryland, I'm Pat O'Leary
reporting."
Brian Conrady, executive producer of AgDay, defended the changes.
"We can clip 'Department of Agriculture' at our choosing,"
he said. "The material we get from the U.S.D.A., if we choose
to air it and how we choose to air it is our choice."
Spreading the Word: Government Efforts and One Woman's
Role
Karen Ryan cringes at the phrase "covert propaganda."
These are words for dictators and spies, and yet they have attached
themselves to her like a pair of handcuffs.
Not long ago, Ms. Ryan was a much sought-after
"reporter" for news segments produced by the federal
government. A journalist at ABC and PBS who became a public
relations consultant, Ms. Ryan worked on about a dozen reports for
seven federal agencies in 2003 and early 2004. Her segments for the
Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National
Drug Control Policy were a subject of the accountability office's
recent inquiries.
The G.A.O. concluded that the two agencies "designed and
executed" their segments "to be indistinguishable from
news stories produced by private sector television news
organizations." A significant part of that execution, the
office found, was Ms. Ryan's expert narration, including her typical
sign-off - "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting" -
delivered in a tone and cadence familiar to television reporters
everywhere.
Last March, when The New York Times first described her role in a
segment about new prescription drug benefits for Medicare patients,
reaction was harsh. In Cleveland, The Plain Dealer ran an editorial
under the headline "Karen Ryan, You're a Phony," and she
was the object of late-night jokes by Jon Stewart and received hate
mail.
"I'm like the Marlboro man," she said in a recent
interview.
In fact, Ms. Ryan was a bit player who made less than $5,000 for
her work on government reports. She was also playing an accepted
role in a lucrative art form, the video news release. "I just
don't feel I did anything wrong," she said. "I just did
what everyone else in the industry was doing."
It is a sizable industry. One of its largest players, Medialink
Worldwide Inc., has about 200 employees, with offices in New York
and London. It produces and distributes about 1,000 video news
releases a year, most commissioned by major corporations. The Public
Relations Society of America even gives an award, the Bronze Anvil,
for the year's best video news release.
Several major television networks play crucial intermediary roles
in the business. Fox, for example, has an arrangement with Medialink
to distribute video news releases to 130 affiliates through its
video feed service, Fox News Edge. CNN distributes releases to 750
stations in the United States and Canada through a similar feed
service, CNN Newsource. Associated Press Television News does the
same thing worldwide with its Global Video Wire.
"We look at them and determine whether we want them to be on
the feed," David M. Winstrom, director of Fox News Edge, said
of video news releases. "If I got one that said tobacco cures
cancer or something like that, I would kill it."
In essence, video news releases seek to exploit a growing
vulnerability of television news: Even as news staffs at the major
networks are shrinking, many local stations are expanding their
hours of news coverage without adding reporters.
"No TV news organization has the resources in labor, time or
funds to cover every worthy story," one video news release
company, TVA Productions, said in a sales pitch to potential
clients, adding that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on
video news releases."
Federal agencies have been commissioning video news releases
since at least the first Clinton administration. [eRiposte
emphasis] An increasing
number of state agencies are producing television news reports, too;
the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department alone has produced some 500
video news releases since 1993.
Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be
producing more releases, and on a broader array of topics.
A definitive accounting is nearly impossible. There is no
comprehensive archive of local television news reports, as there is
in print journalism, so there is no easy way to determine what has
been broadcast, and when and where.
Still, several large agencies, including the Defense Department,
the State Department and the Department of Health and Human
Services, acknowledge expanded efforts to produce news segments.
Many members of Mr. Bush's first-term cabinet appeared in such
segments.
A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough
indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first
term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last
Clinton administration spent. [eRiposte emphasis]
Karen Ryan was part of this push - a "paid shill for the
Bush administration," as she self-mockingly puts it. It is, she
acknowledges, an uncomfortable title.
Ms. Ryan, 48, describes herself as not especially political, and
certainly no Bush die-hard. She had hoped for a long career in
journalism. But over time, she said, she grew dismayed by what she
saw as the decline of television news - too many cut corners, too
many ratings stunts.
In the end, she said, the jump to video news releases from
journalism was not as far as one might expect. "It's almost the
same thing," she said.
There are differences, though. When she went to interview Tommy
G. Thompson, then the health and human services secretary, about the
new Medicare drug benefit, it was not the usual reporter-source
exchange. First, she said, he already knew the questions, and she
was there mostly to help him give better, snappier answers. And
second, she said, everyone involved is aware of a segment's
potential political benefits.
Her Medicare report, for example, was distributed in January
2004, not long before Mr. Bush hit the campaign trail and cited the
drug benefit as one of his major accomplishments.
The script suggested that local anchors lead into the report with
this line: "In December, President Bush signed into law the
first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare."
In the segment, Mr. Bush is shown signing the legislation as Ms.
Ryan describes the new benefits and reports that "all people
with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their
prescription drug spending."
The segment made no mention of the many critics who decry the law
as an expensive gift to the pharmaceutical industry. The G.A.O.
found that the segment was "not strictly factual," that it
contained "notable omissions" and that it amounted to
"a favorable report" about a controversial program.
And yet this news segment, like several others narrated by Ms.
Ryan, reached an audience of millions. According to the
accountability office, at least 40 stations ran some part of the
Medicare report. Video news releases distributed by the Office of
National Drug Control Policy, including one narrated by Ms. Ryan,
were shown on 300 stations and reached 22 million households.
According to Video Monitoring Services of America, a company that
tracks news programs in major cities, Ms. Ryan's segments on behalf
of the government were broadcast a total of at least 64 times in the
40 largest television markets.
Even these measures, though, do not fully capture the reach of
her work. Consider the case of News 10 Now, a cable station in
Syracuse owned by Time Warner. In February 2004, days after the
government distributed its Medicare segment, News 10 Now broadcast a
virtually identical report, including the suggested anchor lead-in.
The News 10 Now segment, however, was not narrated by Ms. Ryan.
Instead, the station edited out the original narration and had one
of its reporters repeat the script almost word for word.
The station's news director, Sean McNamara, wrote in an e-mail
message, "Our policy on provided video is to clearly identify
the source of that video." In the case of the Medicare report,
he said, the station believed it was produced and distributed by a
major network and did not know that it had originally come from the
government.
Ms. Ryan said she was surprised by the number of stations willing
to run her government segments without any editing or
acknowledgement of origin. As proud as she says she is of her work,
she did not hesitate, even for a second, when asked if she would
have broadcast one of her government reports if she were a local
news director.
"Absolutely not."
Little Oversight: TV's Code of Ethics, With Uncertain
Weight
"Clearly disclose the origin of information and label all
material provided by outsiders."
Those words are from the code of ethics of the Radio-Television
News Directors Association, the main professional society for
broadcast news directors in the United States. Some stations go
further, all but forbidding the use of any outside material,
especially entire reports. And spurred by embarrassing publicity
last year about Karen Ryan, the news directors association is close
to proposing a stricter rule, said its executive director, Barbara
Cochran.
Whether a stricter ethics code will have much effect is unclear;
it is not hard to find broadcasters who are not adhering to the
existing code, and the association has no enforcement powers.
The Federal Communications Commission does, but it has never
disciplined a station for showing government-made news segments
without disclosing their origin, a spokesman said.
Could it? Several lawyers experienced with F.C.C. rules say yes.
They point to a 2000 decision by the agency, which stated,
"Listeners and viewers are entitled to know by whom they are
being persuaded."
In interviews, more than a dozen station news directors endorsed
this view without hesitation. Several expressed disdain for the
prepackaged segments they received daily from government agencies,
corporations and special interest groups who wanted to use their
airtime and credibility to sell or influence.
But when told that their stations showed government-made reports
without attribution, most reacted with indignation. Their stations,
they insisted, would never allow their news programs to be co-opted
by segments fed from any outside party, let alone the government.
"They're inherently one-sided, and they don't offer the
possibility for follow-up questions - or any questions at all,"
said Kathy Lehmann Francis, until recently the news director at WDRB,
the Fox affiliate in Louisville, Ky.
Yet records from Video Monitoring Services of America indicate
that WDRB has broadcast at least seven Karen Ryan segments,
including one for the government, without disclosing their origin to
viewers.
Mike Stutz, news director at KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San
Diego, was equally opposed to putting government news segments on
the air.
"It amounts to propaganda, doesn't it?" he said.
Again, though, records from Video Monitoring Services of America
show that from 2001 to 2004 KGTV ran at least one government-made
segment featuring Ms. Ryan, 5 others featuring her work on behalf of
corporations, and 19 produced by corporations and other outside
organizations. It does not appear that KGTV viewers were told the
origin of these 25 segments.
"I thought we were pretty solid," Mr. Stutz said,
adding that they intend to take more precautions.
Confronted with such evidence, most news directors were at a loss
to explain how the segments made it on the air. Some said they were
unable to find archive tapes that would help answer the question.
Others promised to look into it, then stopped returning telephone
messages. A few removed the segments from their Web sites, promised
greater vigilance in the future or pleaded ignorance.
Friends
of the Earth reports this:
The Department of the Interior (DOI) has been
producing and releasing the same kind of misleading video news
releases that have already generated controversy at other federal
agencies. Responding to a Freedom of Information request from
environmental groups Friends of the Earth and Bluewater Network, DOI
provided several prepackaged video news releases that fail to
disclose to TV viewers that they are government products.
“The American people deserve to know when
their tax dollars are being used to create government propaganda
that they are unknowingly watching on TV,” said Korey Hartwich,
policy analyst at Friends of the Earth. “The GAO has already said
that the government should not be producing this kind of propaganda.
It’s time for the Bush administration to put a stop to it, in
every department of government.”
Two releases contained no identifying information
at all on the video footage itself:
* A release on producing methane hydrates
from the ocean has no audio or video ID of DOI at the beginning of
the footage, and ends with the audio, “In Tampa, Pam Forrester
reporting.”
* A release on West Nile Virus also had no
audio or video ID of DOI at the beginning of the footage, ending
with the audio sign-off, “This is Porter Versfelt reporting.”
“The Bush administration’s continued and wide
spread use of mock news reports makes it nearly impossible for the
average citizen to participate meaningfully in their government,”
said Sean Smith, Bluewater Network’s public lands director.
“Moreover, this media manipulation has a corrosive effect on the
public’s faith in TV reporting and may cause reasonable people to
question the source and truthfulness of any story that is favorable
to the Bush agenda.”
A third release, also on West Nile Virus, had no
audio or video ID of DOI at the beginning of the footage. This
release did have an audio ID on sign-off, “For the CDC and USGS
this is Pam Forrester.”
“These releases are not just ‘the facts,’
said Hartwich. “They’re ‘the facts’ as interpreted by and
chosen by whatever government officials were involved in producing
these releases. The issue here is one of transparency: to function
as fully-informed democratic decision-makers, we must know who
prepared ‘the facts’ we’re looking at.”
5.1.9
Armstrong Williams and the Bush Department of Education
As USA Today pointed
out:
Seeking to build support among black
families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid
a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his
nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black
journalists to do the same.
The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB),
required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment
on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview
Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired
during the show in 2004.
Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the
arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's
something I believe in."
The top Democrat on the House Education Committee, Rep. George
Miller of California, called the contract "a very questionable
use of taxpayers' money" that is "probably illegal."
He said he will ask his Republican counterpart to join him in
requesting an investigation.
Let me just pick this
additional post from Atrios, for convenience.
They Write Letters
Lautenberg, Kennedy, and Reid write to President Bush.
Excerpt:
- In addition to the illegality of
these actions taken by your Administration, we believe that the
act of bribing journalists to bias their news in favor of
government policies undermines the integrity of our democracy.
Actions like this were common in the Soviet Union, but until
now, thought to be long extinguished in our country.
These revelations regarding Mr. Williams are the latest – and
most disturbing – in a series of actions by your
Administration to manipulate public opinion through covert
propaganda. On May 19, 2004, the GAO found that your
Administration illegally spent taxpayer funds on covert
propaganda by paying Ketchum Incorporated to produce fake news
stories promoting the image of the new Medicare law.
Full
letter.
...
Williams wrote about NCLB here,
here,
here,
and here.
5.1.10
Maggie Gallagher and the Bush Department of Health and Human Services
Link:
Universal Press Syndicate columnist
Maggie Gallagher says a Saturday column in The Washington Post
retracted a claim about her.
"I would not call it a retraction," responded Editorial
Page Editor Fred Hiatt, who wrote the column, when reached by
E&P.
Added Howard Kurtz, the Post writer who broke the story about
Gallagher receiving $21,500 from the Department of Health and Human
Services to write marriage-themed material, "The only
retraction is in Maggie Gallagher's imagination."
Hiatt's column discussed various columnists, including Gallagher,
involved in controversies this month. He wrote that Gallagher
"should have disclosed her government payments in columns on
the subject," and that writing an opinion column and doing
consulting work for the government are roles that "coexist
uneasily." Hiatt also wrote: "We have not written
editorials about Gallagher; she was not paid to covertly espouse
administration views in her column."
Gallagher apparently interpreted this last line as a retraction. In
a Saturday e-mail to E&P, the columnist said she had sent a
Friday letter to the Post "asking the paper [to] retract the
specific claim the Bush administration paid me 'to help promote the
president's proposal.' For, as I wrote, 'whether Howard Kurtz and
The Washington Post acknowledge it or not, it is this specific
charge and not the question of disclosure that is feeding the media
coverage.'"
To which Gallagher added: "This morning, the editorial
leadership of The Washington Post has done an honorable thing by
retracting the charge." Then she quoted Hiatt's line about how
Gallagher "was not paid to covertly espouse administration
views in her columns."
While people are free to interpret an opinion piece any way they
want, said Hiatt, he's "not in a position to retract"
content generated by the news side of the Post.
Kurtz told E&P there's "nothing to retract" in his
article about Gallagher. "My original story made it crystal
clear that Maggie Gallagher was paid by the Department of Health and
Human Services to directly work on the president's marriage
initiative through such efforts as writing brochures and
ghostwriting a magazine article for a top department official,"
he said. "The article never suggested nor do I believe she was
paid to somehow influence her [other] writing."
He added: "Ms. Gallagher, after apologizing for her mistake, is
playing some kind of semantic game by proclaiming her innocence of
something that The Washington Post never accused her of. My story
was carefully done and accurate, and no correction is
necessary."
Digby had some fun tracking down Ms.
Gallagher's writings. Here is one
snippet:
Maggie has been telling everyone who
will listen, ad nauseum, that she has been a "marriage
expert" for twenty years. But for ten of those years, fully
half of her career, she was an unwed mother. That's quite a CV.
Kathy Grier was kind enough to send along some links to a few of the
rare Maggie writings in which she admits to her little moral
boo-boo.
Here's the
evidence. (I know it's early in the day, but you should pour
yourself a stiff drink before you read it. You're going to need it.
Wow.)
And
here's an interview with the hedonistic San Francisco liberal
mag, Salon, in which she says "I was an unwed mother for ten
years."
Let's just say that there isn't a paper trail showing that quote
amongst her voluminous writings for right wing publications. She
certainly doesn't mention it when she's hectoring girls about sex
out of wedlock or decrying the husbandless home.
One can understand how difficult it is to find a mate and all, but
if you believe so strongly that children should not be raised
without both parents, ten years seems like quite a long time to wait
to find a father for your child. There are matchmaking services on
the Right that could have found Maggie a nice Christian man from
Ardmore, Oklahoma who needed a mother for his five children. Maggie
believes that any father is better than no father (unless he's gay,
of course) so the proper thing to have done would be for her to
sacrifice her "career" as a "marriage expert"
and you know, actually get married
to any man who would have her in order to provide a proper home for
her son. Otherwise she's just another liberal feminazi putting her
own need to live where she wanted and put her education to work and
find a man she loved before the needs of her child. What will we
tell the children?
This is an epidemic on the right. Gallagher reminds me of Susan
Carpenter McMillan anti-abortion zealot (and Paula Jones stylist)
who was revealed to have had two abortions to which she had never
admitted.
I'm beginning to feel sorry for the poor sincere red state schmucks
who believe in all this traditional values stuff. A bunch of slick,
elitist, wingnut hucksters are taking them to the cleaners.
5.1.11
Michael McManus - the self-described ethics expert - and the Bush
Department of Health and Human Services
Link:
"Ethics & Religion"
columnist Michael McManus, after not acknowledging wrongdoing in a
statement last weekend, is now asking readers for
"forgiveness" for failing to disclose that his Marriage
Savers organization received federal money.
In his Feb. 5 column posted today at MarriageSavers.com, McManus
wrote that the Marriage Savers organization, of which he's president
and co-founder, "received $10,200 from the Department of Health
and Human Services to meet with local leaders organizing 'Healthy
Marriage Initiatives.' ... Second, I wrote columns praising the
[Bush] administration for its 'Healthy Marriage Initiative,' without
disclosing that Marriage Savers had received a consulting fee. In
retrospect, that was a conflict of interest. I am truly sorry. I
ask the forgiveness of newspapers publishing my column and of you,
as readers."
He also wrote: "What's particularly painful, I write a column
called 'Ethics & Religion' and am guilty of an ethical
lapse."
McManus self-syndicates "Ethics & Religion" to about
35 newspapers. One of them, the Reading (Pa.) Eagle, ran an
editorial today explaining why it's dropping the column. The
editorial -- which a Feb. 1 E&P story had reported was coming --
stated that McManus "clearly violated journalistic ethics"
by "promot[ing] the Bush agenda without disclosing [he] had
been paid to do so."
5.1.12
Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post/Fox News) and the Bush White House
Link:
The controversy began when Post
staff writers Dan Balz and Jim VandeHei reported
January 22 that the White House process of preparing Bush's
inaugural address included "consultation with a number of
outside experts," including Krauthammer and Weekly Standard
editor William Kristol. On January 24, Media Matters for America
demonstrated
that both Kristol and Krauthammer subsequently praised Bush's speech
on FOX News Channel while failing to disclose their private
consultations with White House officials. Kristol also wrote a
laudatory article about the speech for The Weekly Standard
without disclosing any private connection to it.
A January 29 Post article
by staff writer and media critic Howard Kurtz quoted Post
editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, who publishes Krauthammer's
column, as saying that the contention that Krauthammer consulted on
the speech -- as reported January 22 by the Post's news
department -- "is false"; Hiatt also wrote in a January 29
column
that Krauthammer "has gotten a bum rap." But Kurtz quoted
Liz Spayd, the paper's assistant managing editor for national news,
as saying: "We stand by the story we wrote. We have a firsthand
source who says it was crystal clear a primary purpose of the
meeting was to seek advice on both Bush's inaugural and State of the
Union speeches."
Kristol described to Kurtz a
breakfast he had with Peter Wehner, director of the White House
Office of Strategic Initiatives, and presidential speechwriter
Michael Gerson, in November 2004 to discuss "themes for the
second term and included in that, themes for the inaugural."
Kristol said the inaugural address was not discussed
"concretely." Wehner told Kurtz he may have discussed the
speech with Kristol but wasn't sure.
Kurtz reported that the invitation to
a January 10 White House meeting attended by Krauthammer said:
"What should this administration do/say more of -- and what
should it do/say less of? What are the key achievable goals we
should aim for during the next four years?" Kurtz reported that
Wehner, who attended the meeting along with Gerson, White House
counselor Dan Bartlett, and White House senior adviser Karl Rove,
among others, asked Krauthammer "to lead off the discussion on
'spreading liberty to the Middle East.'" Krauthammer described
the meeting to Kurtz as "an informal, off-the-record discussion
of U.S. Middle East policy. ... This meeting was not designed to be
the exercise in speech preparation. Nor did I have that impression
during the meeting itself that it was. If I had, I would have
mentioned it when commenting on it." Wehner told Kurtz the
meeting was "pretty much divorced" from Bush's inaugural
address.
On January 30, Post ombudsman
Michael Getler weighed
in, writing that "Krauthammer has since told the Post that
the speech never came up at the meeting, that he did not consider
himself to have been consulting in any way on it, and that if it had
come up, he would have disclosed it." Getler did not address
the point that Post news editor Spayd was quoted in Kurtz's
article the previous day as saying that the newspaper stands by its
story that a "primary purpose of the meeting was to seek advice
on both Bush's inaugural and State of the Union speeches."
Krauthammer and Spayd can't both be
correct, and Getler, while appearing to accept Krauthammer's
statement, was apparently unwilling or unable to resolve the
conflict.
Getler concluded: "If they [Krauthammer
and Kristol] were involved in some fashion in helping shape the
themes of the speech, and were then going to comment on it, they
should have acknowledged their role or participation. Even better,
in my view, would be for columnists, generally, to stay out of White
House advisory deliberations. They have ample opportunity to lay out
their thoughts in public."
Leaving aside the January 22 Post
report that Krauthammer consulted on the inaugural address, which he
denies, the issue of the disclosure of the White House meeting and
any advice Krauthammer may have given remains. Kurtz wrote that Tom
Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism,
"said a columnist who offered the White House foreign-policy
advice should disclose that when writing on the subject."
Rosenstiel told Kurtz: "If there is nothing wrong with doing
it, there's nothing wrong with sharing it. ... Journalists owe their
first allegiance to their audience." Rosenstiel added that
another "potential problem" is that "policymakers
like to meet with journalists and ask their advice as a way of
co-opting them."
Kurtz's article confirmed that both
Kristol and Krauthammer privately consulted with high White House
officials about presidential policies and communications.
Subsequently, both Kristol and Krauthammer have written and
commented publicly on the administration without disclosure. For
example, eleven days after meeting at the White House to discuss
what Wehner called "spreading liberty in the Middle East,"
Krauthammer wrote a January 21 column
headlined "Tomorrow's Threat," in which he argued:
"The great project of the Bush administration -- the
strengthening and spread of democracy -- is enjoying considerable
success."
Hiatt told Kurtz that "Post
editorial board members are not permitted to offer politicians
private advice," but "obviously I have less ability to set
rules for people who don't work for me."
Krauthammer has yet to disclose his
private meeting with top White House officials to his readers in his
column -- syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group and
published by Hiatt -- even as he continues to write about the
administration, and the Post is apparently leaving the
decision on whether to do so up to him.
5.1.13 California GOP
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his fake news videos
Dion
Nissenbaum in the San Jose Mercury News:
Had they been produced by the federal government, the mock TV
reports touting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's pet projects probably
would have been deemed ``covert propaganda'' by congressional
investigators.
It's not the use of taxpayer dollars to pay a former TV reporter
to produce videos trumpeting the governor's agenda that would cross
the line. It's the failure to explicitly tell viewers that they are
produced by the government.
Whether the Schwarzenegger videos run afoul of state laws is
being examined by both the California attorney general and lawyers
in the Legislature. But the governor's decision to adopt a disputed
strategy used by the Bush administration has the former actor who
prides himself on being a master of marketing and media savvy
fending off accusations that he's gone too far.
``You would have to believe that most of California's local TV
news directors just fell off the turnip truck if you feed them
anchor scripts and one-sided tape packages from the Schwarzenegger
propaganda ministry,'' said Marty Kaplan, associate dean at the USC
Annenberg School for Communication. ``Paying for them with taxpayer
money, and pretending they're garden-variety video news releases,
compounds that arrogance by extending that contempt to the public.''
The unfolding debate in California mirrors the controversy in
Washington, where President Bush used federal funds to produce
hundreds of videos that look like TV news reports on everything from
his health care proposals to his anti-drug policies.
Administration officials in Washington and Sacramento have argued
that there was no intent to deceive television viewers, that all the
videos begin with statements informing news directors that they were
produced by the government.
Federal warning
But the U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded in a
series of decisions issued over the past 10 months that, at least at
the federal level, that isn't good enough. And the independent
congressional watchdog drove that point home last month in a memo
sent to all federal agencies warning them to be vigilant about not
breaking anti-propaganda laws.
``It is not enough that the contents of an agency's communication
may be unobjectionable,'' wrote Comptroller General David M. Walker.
``Neither is it enough for an agency to identify itself to the
broadcasting organization as the source of the prepackaged news
story.''
Walker didn't knock the videos themselves. He simply said the
government must ensure that the news reports themselves, not just
the lead-ins, make it clear where they come from.
``Prepackaged news stories can be utilized without violating the
law,'' wrote Walker, ``so long as there is clear disclosure to the
television viewing audience that this material was prepared by, or
in cooperation with, the government department or agency,''
Video news releases, as they are known, have become a popular
public-relations tool over the past two decades. Drug companies use
them to send TV stations video of their latest pill. Environmental
groups hand out video of e-waste sites in Asia.
Studies have found that hundreds of television stations routinely
use portions of video news releases. But it was last year's Bush
administration videos that sparked a debate over the use of mock
news stories by both the government and media.
Schwarzenegger isn't the first California governor to use the
tactic. Democratic Gov. Gray Davis issued a couple of Labor Day
videos talking up the California worker and state economy. But
Schwarzenegger has taken the strategy to the next level by using the
news-story format to publicize some of his most contentious
proposals -- from diluting teacher tenure rules to blocking orders
that would put more nurses in state hospitals.
$5,000 spent
In all, the administration estimates that it has spent about
$5,000 on five videos. Most follow the same format: They open with
suggested introductory text for news anchors to read, followed by
the news story narrated by Tim Herrera, a former television
journalist.
Herrera, one of the administration's multimedia communications
specialists, includes footage of the governor at various public
events, interviews with government officials and clips of restaurant
employees or nurses on the job supporting the administration
position. Unlike traditional news reports, these contain no critical
views, something the administration says it's not obligated to do.
``The government has the right to advocate and state a position
and, in many cases, is obligated to do that, and doing that through
a video format is a way to reach more people,'' said Herrera, a
Democrat who spent nearly two decades in broadcast journalism.
State law does block use of some state services ``for political,
sectarian, or propaganda purposes.'' And the Legislature's attorneys
initial review has found no authority for the administration to use
taxpayer money to create the videos.
Even if officials should have done more to clearly identify the
videos as government-produced, some media analysts said the
responsibility to the viewer lies more with television stations than
the Schwarzenegger administration.
``The onus is on the journalist,'' said Susan Rasky, a former New
York Times reporter now working as a senior lecturer at the
University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
``Nobody twists our arms to use these, and my feeling is that
anything we get from the government in one way or another is
designed to promote the government's view.''
If anything, said Rasky, the hubbub underscores just how scripted
Schwarzenegger's administration has become and how little access
journalists have to the governor.
5.1.14
Mike Vasilinda and Florida's GOP Governor Jeb Bush's administration
Via Bonddad
at Dailykos, comes this story in Florida's Herald
Tribune:
At the same time one of
Florida's most visible television reporters brought the news to
viewers around the state, he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars
on the side from the government agencies he covered.
Mike Vasilinda, a 30-year veteran of the Tallahassee press corps, does
public relations work and provides film editing services to more than
a dozen state agencies.
His Tallahassee company, Mike Vasilinda Productions Inc., has earned
more than $100,000 over the past four years through contracts with
Gov. Jeb Bush's office, the Secretary of State, the Department of
Education and other government entities that are routinely part of
Vasilinda's stories.
Vasilinda also was paid to work on campaign ads for at least one
politician and to create a promotional movie for Leon County. One of
his biggest state contracts was a 1996 deal that paid nearly $900,000
to air the weekly drawing for the Florida Lottery.
Meanwhile, the freelance reporter's stories continued to air on CNN
and most Florida NBC stations, including WFLA-Channel 8 in Tampa.
On Friday, Vasilinda told the Herald-Tribune that his business
dealings with state government don't influence his reporting.
"I have processes in place to make sure the products we put out
for our news clients are free from bias from any source,"
Vasilinda said. "We absolutely keep arm's length between the two
divisions of our company."
But Bob Steele, a journalism ethics professor at the Poynter Institute
in St. Petersburg, said Vasilinda's state government work
"certainly raises some red flags."
"Journalists should be guided by a principle of independence, and
their primary loyalty should be to the public," Steele said.
"When journalists have loyalties to a government office or
government agencies, those competing loyalties can undermine
journalistic independence."
Vasilinda's stories reach millions of viewers because he sells them
through Capitol News Service, the television wire service he founded
and runs in Tallahassee. NBC and other stations subscribe to Capitol
News Service and then can download and air any segments done by
Vasilinda or the reporters who work for him.
...
Vasilinda said his situation
is nothing like Williams' because he has not personally promoted any
government programs or appeared in any of the videos his business
produced.
In fact, Vasilinda has a reputation for being among the most
aggressive reporters covering government in Tallahassee.
"No one has ever suggested that our coverage, in any way, is soft
on anybody," Vasilinda said. "The proof is in the
pudding."
Steele said that argument doesn't work because being unbiased is only
partly about what gets on the air.
"We don't know everything he passed up, questions he didn't ask,
issues he didn't explore," Steele said.
Many of the agencies that have contracted with Vasilinda were unable
to provide details of the contracts late Friday.
In January, a Herald-Tribune reporter left repeated messages with Gov.
Bush spokeswoman Alia Faraj requesting information about whether any
journalists have received money from state agencies.
...
State officials from several
agencies said Vasilinda Productions has created promotional videos,
filmed public service announcements featuring prominent government
officials and made copies of videos and compact disks for agencies.
Several years ago, Vasilinda Productions produced a back-to-school
video featuring then-Education Commissioner Charlie Crist who went on
to become Attorney General and is now considered a contender for
governor in 2006.
The fact that Vasilinda works for government agencies is widely known
among reporters and government officials in Tallahassee.
At a press conference in front of other reporters in 1996, then-Sen.
Jack Latvala, a Republican from Palm Harbor, singled out Vasilinda for
accepting the lottery contract.
But viewers around the state have never been told of Vasilinda's broad
financial ties to state government.
In fact, several television executives at Florida's NBC affiliates --
stations associated with but not owned by NBC -- said they were
unaware of Vasilinda's contracts and would not comment on them until
they had more information.
CNN, which aired a Vasilinda story on Terri Schiavo on Thursday, did
not return phone calls seeking comment.
The only NBC-owned news station in Florida, WTBJ in Miami, said it
will review the situation with Vasilinda and won't run any stories he
produces until they have completed the review.
WFLA News Director Forrest Carr said he knew that Vasilinda had been
hired by the state but did not know how many contracts or how much
money Vasilinda had been paid.
...
5.1.15
Charles Chieppo and Massachusetts' GOP Governor Mitt Romney's
administration
Raphael
Lewis (Boston Globe):
The Boston Herald yesterday
ended its relationship with an op-ed columnist who is also working as
a promotional writer for Governor Mitt Romney's administration after
learning that the writer had failed to disclose a separate contract
with the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority.
Charles D. Chieppo began a contract worth up to $32,000 with the
convention center in February to organize a conference to promote
the state's tourism industry. The Globe reported yesterday that
Chieppo also began a $10,000 contract with the Romney administration
this week to pen op-ed pieces and material touting the governor's
environmental policies.
Gwen Gage, a spokeswoman for the Herald, said Thursday that the
paper's editorial page editor, Rachelle Cohen, had approved
Chieppo's environmental consulting work with the administration
because he had disclosed it and because he agreed not to write about
any topics related to his contract. However, Chieppo did not
disclose the convention center contract; Cohen learned about it when
a Globe reporter called yesterday seeking comment.
''Rachelle did not know about that [contract], and the deal that
she had with Charlie was that he disclose any consulting work that
he was doing," Gage said.
Herald publisher Patrick Purcell issued a brief statement saying,
''Upon further review, the Boston Herald has decided to sever our
relationship with Charles Chieppo."
Though he lost the Herald op-ed column, Chieppo apparently will
continue working under the two state contracts.
Chieppo, who began writing on the Herald's op-ed page in January,
said in an interview yesterday that it did not occur to him that he
should have informed Herald editors about his convention center
authority work, which pays $100 an hour. A former member of the
authority's board of directors, Chieppo said he is forbidden by
state ethics rules from accepting money for writing about the
authority and thus never considered it an issue.
''It just didn't occur to me to be an issue because it was in an
area that I was precluded from writing about anyway due to ethics
rules, and clearly, that was an error in judgment on my part,"
Chieppo said.
5.1.16 Andrea
Engleman and Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV)
Las
Vegas Sun:
Rep. Jim Gibbons paid a veteran television reporter $8,000 for
consulting last year while she was working as a freelance reporter
for a Reno radio station, according to campaign finance reports.
A Federal Election Commission document filed by Gibbons, R-Nev.,
lists the payment to Andrea Engleman on Nov. 30, 2004, weeks after
she had been fired as co-host of the television news program Nevada
Newsmakers. At the time the contract was in effect, Engleman said,
she was compiling reports for KOH-AM radio in Reno.
Gibbons' spokeswoman, Amy Spanbauer, told the Las Vegas
Review-Journal for a Tuesday report that Engleman was hired to
conduct postelection analysis for the congressman.
"It was our understanding that she was not contracting with
any media at the time," Spanbauer said.
Spanbauer said Engleman performed the work in December and has
not done any work since. However, she said, future consulting work
was a possibility.
"It depends on what she does with her career,"
Spanbauer said.
Engleman, the former director of the Nevada Press Association,
said the consulting work proposal was made by Gibbons' wife, Dawn
Gibbons, a former Republican state assemblywoman.
Shortly after her Nov. 9, 2004, firing from Nevada Newsmakers,
Engleman said, she and Dawn Gibbons met for a previously scheduled
lunch.
"Dawn talked to me at the end of November and wanted to know
how I was going to get through Christmas," Engleman said.
"Frankly, they did it more to help me. They asked me to do some
research."
Engleman, 64, declined to specify the type of research she did
for the congressman. She said the contract was for December only.
Dawn Gibbons did not respond to a message left by the
Review-Journal.
Engleman said she didn't sever all reporting ties when she took
the consulting job. She said she was working as a freelance reporter
for KOH at the time and that she cleared her consulting work with
the station.
Also see Crooks
and Liars.
5.1.17
Clear Channel and George Bush ("Our Leader")
From Raw
Story:
A billboard recently put up in
Orlando bearing a smiling photograph of President Bush with the
words “Our Leader” is raising eyebrows among progressives who
feel the poster is akin to that of propaganda used by tyrannical
regimes.
RAW
STORY confirmed the
billboard’s existence Monday evening. The billboard pictured,
which is on I-4, says that it is a “political public service
message brought to you by Clear Channel Outdoor.”
A second billboard bearing the same
image along the same route says it was paid for by Charles W.
Clayton Jr. Clayton’s firm, Charles Clayton Construction, said he
was traveling this week and couldn’t be reached for comment.
The Clear Channel-sponsored billboard
was not lit up for drivers Monday evening. The Clayton billboard
was.
In response to inquiries from RAW
STORY and the Associated Press, Clear Channel Outdoor issued a
statement asserting that the billboard’s content was the product
of the local office of the company, and not a corporate decision.
It appeared to confirm that Clear
Channel did indeed place the billboard in question.
“Clear Channel Outdoor markets are
operated locally,” Tony Alwin, Senior Vice President, Creative for
Clear Channel Outdoor, said. “Local managers determine what copy
to use when a location has time that is not sold to an
advertiser.”
Clear Channel Outdoor Orlando said
they could not respond to requests for comment this week because
their press person was “away.” They referred calls to their San
Antonio corporate parent, which did not return two messages for
comment.
The Orlando Associated Press bureau
said they had seen at least one sign but didn’t plan a story. They
suggested that the signs would only become a story were there a
public response to the billboards, and that the county in which they
were situated would probably meet the signs with “a warm
response.”
One Orlando resident penned a concerned
letter to the (registration-restricted) Orlando Sentinel on
Saturday about the billboard. As the site is restricted to members,
the letter appears below.
“The first thing I thought was,
when was the last time I have seen a president on a billboard?”
wrote resident Dianna Lawson. “Didn’t Saddam Hussein have his
picture up everywhere? What next, a statue?”
Orlando Sentinel Letters Editor Dixie
Tate said they wouldn’t have printed the letter were it false.
Other reporters at the Sentinel told RAW
STORY they’d also seen the billboard.
Others said they’d seen a similar
sign in Jacksonville along I-95.
“We don’t do political
advertising,” said Jacksonville Clear Channel sales representative
Brad Parsons. He said the photograph was probably bogus.
A second Jacksonville rep
acknowledged the company did political advertising but only when
paid for by a third party. When asked if he would look at the
picture for verification, he declined to give out his email address.
Common Cause, the public interest
advocacy group, said the billboard probably wasn’t a violation of
campaign finance regulations, but expressed concern about Clear
Channel’s history and their use of billboard space to support the
Administration.
“I think it sort of exemplifies the
fact that big media companies are going to do all they can to stay
on the good side of the administration because they’re very
concerned about any efforts in Congress to challenge their
ownership,” Common Cause Vice President for Advocacy Celia Wexler
said Tuesday.
“Clear Channel has a history of
weighing in in controversial ways that don’t respect the diversity
of opinion,” she added. “It is in keeping with Clear Channel’s
vision of the world which is to not take seriously an effort to
serve the public interest or be non-partisan.”
[You can read more about Clear Channel
in Section 5.3]
5.1.18
Fox News and the Bush administration/GOP
One could surely write a book listing
the propaganda that Fox News delivers daily for the GOP (actually
there's a film that captures some of it - Outfoxed
- go see it), but I am time constrained. So here are just a few
examples.
Via Wonkette:
After the jump are about 30 memos from Fox News chief John Moody,
released to journalists by the makers of the anti-Fox documentary
"Outfoxed" to support their claim that Fox bends the rules
and twists the news. And boy howdy, do they.
...
From: John Moody
Date: 6/3/2003
...
The president is doing something that few of his predecessors dared
undertake: putting the US case for mideast peace to an Arab summit.
It's a distinctly skeptical crowd that Bush faces. His political
courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting
through the day.
...
From: John Moody
Date: 3/12/2004
...
The President is on the stump, this time for women's rights. His
remarks may be worth dipping into and then getting out.
John Kerry may wish he'd taken off his microphone before trashing
the GOP. Though he insists he meant republican "attack
squads," his coarse description of his opponents has cast a
lurid glow over the campaign.
...
From: John Moody
Date: 3/23/2004
...
The so-called 9/11 commission has already been meeting. In fact,
this is the eighth session. The fact that former Clinton and both
frmer and current Bush administration officials are testifying gives
it a certain tension, but this is not "what did he know and
when did he know it" stuff. Do not turn this into Watergate.
Remember the fleeting sense of national unity that emerged from this
tragedy. Let's not desecrate that.
...
From: John Moody
Date: 3/24/2004
...
As the witness list indicates, today is likely to be the apex of the
so-called 9/11 commission hearings. Tenet, Clarke, and Clinton NSC
advisor Berger all testify. We will carry their statements, along
with he Q&A, live. Remember that while there are obvious
political implications for Bush, the commission is looking at eight
years of the Clinton Administration versus eight months (the time
prior to 9/11 that Bush was in office) for the incumbent.
...
From: John Moody
Date: 4/4/2004
MONDAY UPDATE: Into Fallujah: It's called Operation Vigilant
Resolve and it began Monday morning (NY time) with the US and Iraqi
military surrounding Fallujah. We will cover this hour by hour
today, explaining repeatedly why it is happening. It won't be long
before some people start to decry the use of "excessive
force." We won't be among that group.
The continuing carnage in Iraq -- mostly the deaths of seven US
troops in Sadr City -- is leaving the American military little
choice but to punish perpetrators. When this happens, we should be
ready to put in context the events that led to it. More than 600 US
military dead, attacks on the UN headquarters last year,
assassination of Irai officials who work with the coalition, the
deaths of Spanish troops last fall, the outrage in Fallujah:
whatever happens, it is richly deserved.
...
The President goes to Charlotte to talk about job training.
Buoyed by the 300K job figure last week, he can boast his policies
are working.
...
From: John Moody
Date: 4/6/2004
The events in Iraq Tuesday are going to be the top story, unless
and until something else (or worse) happens. Err on the side of
doing too much Iraq rather than not enough. Do not fall into the
easy trap of mourning the loss of US lives and asking out loud why
are we there? The US is in Iraq to help a country brutalized for 30
years protect the gains made by Operation Iraqi Freedom and set it
on the path to democracy. Some people in Iraq don't want that to
happen. That is why American GIs are dying. And what we should
remind our viewers.
...
From: John Moody
Date: 4/26/2004
...
Ribbons or medals? Which did John Kerry throw away after he returned
from Vietnam. This may become an issue for him today. His perceived
disrespect for the military could be more damaging to the candidate
than questions about his actions in uniform.
...
Here is another example
of the kind of pro-GOP propaganda Fox News transmits every day.
Since April 2002, FOX News has
consistently doctored Associated Press articles featured on the FOX
News website concerning terrorist attacks in the Middle East to
conform to Bush administration terminology. Without any editorial
notation disclosing that words in the AP articles have been changed,
FOX News replaces the terms "suicide bomber" and
"suicide bombing" with "homicide bomber" and
"homicide bombing" to describe attackers who kill
themselves and others with explosives. In at least one case, FOX
News actually altered
an AP quote from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) to fit this
naming convention, and then revised it to restore the quote without
noting either the original alteration or its correction.
The Associated Press noted in April
2002 that FOX News first began using the term "homicide
bombing" in its own reports immediately after Bush
administration officials -- such as then-White House press secretary
Ari
Fleischer -- adopted the term. While other news organizations
continued to use the term "suicide bomber," the AP reported,
"Dennis Murray, executive producer of [FOX News'] daytime
programming, said executives there had heard the phrase
["homicide bombing"] being used by administration
officials in recent days and thought it was a good idea."
But Media Matters for America
has found that FOX has applied the "homicide" terminology
not only in its own original reports, but also in the AP reports
that it publishes on its website. Readers are led to believe that
the AP itself uses the "homicide" terminology, when in
fact it does not. According to a Media Matters search, the AP
has used the terms "homicide bomber" or "homicide
bombing" when referring to terrorist attacks in only one
article, published on May 7, 2004. These terms have otherwise
appeared in AP articles only in quotations.
You can see the tip of the iceberg here
and here.
The fact that Faux News is merely a propaganda arm of the
Republican Party also gets revealed more directly sometimes, as this
Media Matters piece illustrates:
Responding to Sen. Trent Lott's (R-MS) suggestion that Senate
Republicans had the necessary votes to invoke the so-called nuclear
option and that such a step was necessary, Fox News anchor David
Asman asked Lott why Republican senators had compromised
on the issue. Why compromise, Asman asked, "if we should
have done it and if we had the votes to do it." Asman
clarified that it was "you guys in the Republican
party" who had the votes.
From the May 25 edition of Fox News Live:
ASMAN: You're the chairman of the rules committee. Did Senator
[Bill] Frist [R-TN] have the votes to end the filibuster?
LOTT: I believe that he did. It would have been very close. We
would have probably gotten a 50-50 tie vote, with the vice
president breaking the tie. Perhaps we'd have had 51 before it was
over. I do think it's a rule that should be in place because what
the Democrats have been doing is not, you know, protecting a rule,
they have been causing something different. The filibusters on a
serial basis, federal judicial nominees to the appellate courts,
was unprecedented for 214 years. So, to put that rule in place
saying that it only takes 51 votes to confirm these judges was
something I thought we should do. Remember now --
ASMAN: So, Senator, if we should have done it and if
we had the votes to do it in the Senate -- if you guys in the
Republican Party did -- then why did you need a compromise?
LOTT: Well, you know, I would argue that we probably should
have gone forward with the vote, all things considered.
5.1.19 Sinclair
Broadcasting
Evan
Derkacz at Alternet writes:
Set aside "values" and voter fraud for a moment and
just take a look at Sinclair Broadcasting Group. If the nation's
largest owner of TV stations didn't actually help reelect George W.
Bush it wasn't for lack of effort. Their message to America now: Our
man won, deregulation will continue and we've only just begun ... to
expand.
First a recap, then a fresh glimpse inside Sinclair. Back in
April, Sinclair ordered its ABC affiliates not to air an episode of Nightline
during which host Ted Koppel planned to simply read the names of the
fallen soldiers – around 700 at the time. When pressed to explain
this unprecedented move, denounced sharply by Sen. John McCain
(R-AZ) among others, Sinclair's CEO, David Smith, responded:
"ABC is disguising political statements as news content."
In early October, less than a month before "the most
important election of our lives," Sinclair brazenly ordered its
62 TV stations (including several in the major swing states of Ohio
and Florida) to preempt regular programming to air, just days before
the election, a documentary attacking John Kerry.
Not only was the documentary, "Stolen Honor: Wounds That
Never Heal," created by a Bush family friend, but it was filled
with demonstrable lies.
Yet Sinclair's VP, lobbyist and one of the nation's most
high-profile conservative commentators, Mark Hyman, responded
(reportedly with a straight face): "This is a powerful story...
The networks are acting like Holocaust deniers and pretending [the
POWs] don't exist."
Former FCC chairman Reed Hundt, not quite your average flaming
liberal, was flabbergasted: "Ordering stations to carry
propaganda? It's absolutely off the charts." Even Sinclair's
own Washington bureau chief, Jon Leiberman, called it "biased
political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this
election." He was promptly fired.
Those incidents have been publicized. What goes on in Sinclair's
daily operations, however, is something many of us know little
about.
"More Aggressive Than Fox"
For starters, a single studio at Sinclair's home office in
suburban Maryland, known as "NewsCentral," creates news
segments which are then mixed with live broadcasting at the 62
stations to create the "illusion of local news," as Paul
Schmelzer put it in an AlterNet
article from late October. He went on: "In some cases,
personnel at the local station have to coach on-air personalities at
Sinclair central casting on tough regional pronunciation of town
names."
The Sinclair story reads like a cautionary tale about media
consolidation. The centralized and hierarchical structure allows a
tiny editorial team in Maryland to fundamentally control the news
that reaches nearly 25 percent of the American audience. The
product, says media critic Jay Rosen, is "more aggressive than
Fox News Channel."
Or, straight from the horse's mouth, ex-Washington bureau chief
Lieberman: "(N)ewsroom leaders (at the encouragement of Hyman)
started suggesting pro-administration story ideas. They made sure
that every political story had a comment from the Bush
administration... But I know in my heart what they're doing is
wrong. It's not fair and balanced ... It's pure propaganda, and
they're trying to shoehorn what should be a format for editorials or
commentary into news,"
It's enough to make Rupert Murdoch blush.
Which brings us to Sinclair's pride and joy, a nightly editorial
broadcast called "The Point," produced and delivered by
none other than Sinclair V.P. and lobbyist, Mark Hyman. Ironically,
these one-minute segments are a shameless attempt, as Sinclair's CEO
so eloquently said of Nightline, at "disguising
political statements as news content."
Media Matters for America, a New York-based not-for-profit
progressive research center, analyzed all segments of "The
Point" between Nov. 2 and Dec. 1, and concluded this:
"'The Point' contains a steady stream of one-sided
anti-progressive and pro-Bush rhetoric that is broadcast without a
progressive counterpoint."
Samples from "The Point" bear an uncanny resemblance to
Republican talking points:
- On Oct. 25, Hyman claimed that Kerry earned the Silver Star
for killing a "wounded man as he retreated from
battle." Dick Cheney's vaunted factcheck.org had already
debunked that charge.
- On Oct. 26, just a week before the election, Hyman echoed the
Swift Boat liars' Kerry smear: "13 American POWs...
rebutted Kerry's claims that his 1971 testimony accusing
American servicemen of 'war crimes' ... harmed no one."
Hyman also referred to the POWs' claim in "Stolen
Honor" that Kerry's actions worsened the POWs' treatment:
"[T]hey say ... Kerry's testimony was used by their
Communist captors."
- On Nov. 15, Hyman claimed that the Democratic Party is in
"the clutches of the Angry Left" and that
"Mainstream America will not vote for a party run by
Hollywood liberals, greedy trial lawyers and clueless
academia."
But none of this should come as a shock from a corporation in
which the owners – David D. Smith and his three brothers – and
their executives made 97 percent of their political donations during
the 2004 election cycle to Bush and the Republicans. The brothers
alone have given $121,000 to the Republican Party since 1999, and
each of them contributed the maximum $2,000 to the 2004 Bush
campaign.
Yet "Sinclair is barely profitable and laden with
debt," says USA Today. So why would successful businessmen
throw so much money at it? Surely right-wing ideology only goes so
far?
In fact, Sinclair believes its right wing ideology will pay
dividends.
Political Interests v. Shareholder Value
Bill Carter, writing in The New York Times, cited what's known as
"the Sinclair payback provision." Sinclair put
stockholders at risk in its attempt to become a "king
maker." The idea was to support Bush and his crusade to further
deregulate media consolidation. After all, Sinclair already engages
in questionable practices like having the CEO's mother buy a station
in a market where Sinclair already owns the legal maximum of one.
And Kerry had promised to halt deregulation.
...
You can read more about the Sinclair's fraudulent pro-GOP
propaganda operations at Sinclair
Action and Media
Matters.
APPENDIX
To be conservative, I have not included the following cases as
examples of mainstream media tolerance of propaganda, even though
they are - in reality.
(a) Jeff Gannon/Talon News
(b) Rush Limbaugh
(a) Jeff
Gannon/Talon News
When Jeff Gannon (aka James Guckert) and his employer
"Talon News" were revealed to be a propaganda arm of the
GOP/Bush administration (not to mention serial plagiarists), the
ICM's utter reluctance to cover this case in detail and explore the
whats and whys behind it, showed their total comfort with propaganda
(even if they issued formal denials claiming they abhor propaganda).
If they really were against propagandizing for the White House,
would it not be important to reveal the lies and possible
back-story to Gannongate?
Gannon/Guckert is the GOP operative
whom Media Matters revealed
to be a fake reporter who was fabricating "news" against
Democrats and simultaneously directly cutting and pasting text from
Republican Party and Bush White House "fact sheets" and a
Bush speech and passing them off as independent "reporting"
for an outfit calling itself "Talon News" (which seemed
to have more than one fake reporter doing similar things). A number
of websites have covered Gannon [who incidentally, is also, per
Americablog's reporting, an alleged gay prostitute]. One could start
with the excellent grassroots investigations by Susan
G and her cohorts at DailyKos. Other recommended websites on this
topic are: World
O'Crap, Americablog,
and the entire Jeff Gannon coverage in the Nashua
Advocate (one great post is here). More recently, Ron Brynaert (of Why
Are We Back in Iraq) has been doing an excellent job showing that
Gannon/Guckert was not just plagiarizing from GOP documents. He and
his "colleagues" at "Talon News" were doing the
same from mainstream media news reports. Ron's
series
of
posts are worth
reading (also see here). Note that in a recent appearance at the National Press
Club to discuss "journalism" (one doesn't know who is worse
here - Gannon or the National Press Club for inviting him fully
knowing his history), Gannon actually defended the Bush
administration's use of propaganda and paying of columnists. More on
that here.
Here's one
of the many posts of relevance at the Nashua Advocate:
...Remember February 10th, 2005?
When the conservative news outlet Accuracy in Media (AIM) reported
that an exhaustive list of Jeff Gannon's journalistic
"crimes" would include no more and no less than the
following: "he was too pro-Republican, he attended White House
briefings, and he asked questions unfair to Democrats"?
God, we were young then.
[Sigh].
Times changed, though, didn't they?
And how!
Like just a few hours later, when Media
Matters for America called everyone's attention back to the fact
that Jeff Gannon had once fabricated a news report in order to bring
down Democratic Presidential Candidate John F. Kerry.
And boy, did that change everything!
Within two weeks, conservative muckrakers like Andrew Sullivan would
express their outrage [eRiposte:
the Advocate is joking here considering that the opposite happened]
at a White House news correspondent revealed as a willing
participant in a wide-ranging, well-coordinated, partisan campaign
to put Bush in the White House and Senate Minority Leader Tom
Daschle back in front of his television at home, eating peanuts or
perhaps chocolate-covered pretzels.
...
Here is some classic horseshit
from Talon News:
Kerry's Alleged Intern Identified, Taped Interview With Major
Television Network
February 16th, 2004
SPARTANBURG, SC (Talon News) -- The name of the intern Democratic
presidential front-runner Sen. John F. Kerry (D-MA) allegedly had a
two-year extramarital affair with beginning in Spring 2001 surfaced
over the weekend.
The Telegraph UK reported on Sunday that the name of the Kerry's
intern is 27-year old journalist Alexandra Polier. "This is not
going to go away," said an American friend of Polier to the
Telegraph UK. "What actually happened is much nastier than is
being reported."
Polier formerly worked for the New York bureau of the Associated
Press after graduating with a double major in philosophy and
government from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts and
with a journalism degree from Columbia University in New York. She
is currently living in Kenya with the parents of her fiance Yaron
Schwartzman, who works for a company called FilmStudios. The couple
met at Columbia University and plan to get married later this year.
Thus far, neither of them have publicly commented on the alleged
affair that was revealed by Internet news web site The Drudge Report
on Thursday. As reported by Talon News on Friday, a source at one of
the major television networks said they are specifically forbidden
to talk about this story on the air until one of the other major
television networks reports on it first.
As related by Media
Matters, Gannon's article advanced a new element in the supposed
"intern sex" fiasco: "that the woman in question had
taped an interview with 'one of the major television networks' in
which she substantiated the allegation." We pick up again with
Media Matters at this point in the story:
On February 12, The Drudge Report featured a "World
Exclusive" under the headline "Campaign Drama Rocks
Democrats: Kerry Fights Off Media Probe of Recent Alleged
Infidelity, Rivals Predict Ruin."
On February 13, Kerry flatly denied the story to Don Imus, saying:
"Well, there is nothing to report. So there is nothing to talk
about. I'm not worried about it. No."
[On] February 17...Polier told the Associated Press: "I have
never had a relationship with Senator Kerry, and the rumors in the
press are completely false."
[Also on February 17], Newsday columnist James P. Pinkerton pointed
out [that]..."The woman, Alexandra Polier, said that all the
allegations were false. And her parents issued a statement
supporting not only their daughter, but also Kerry's candidacy for
president."
Pinkerton specifically addressed Gannon's Talon article:
"Walking on the even wilder side, an online news outfit, Talon
News, asserted that the woman had 'taped an interview with one of
the major television networks at Christmas substantiating the
alleged affair.'"
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Pinkerton refers here to a longer version of the
article above, which has since been--how odd!--completely wiped from
the Talon News, GOPUSA, and JeffGannon.com archives].
But oh, the wonder of the internet!
Men's News Daily has saved the article
for us, though it now (erroneously) is credited to a "Jimmy
Moore" (another Gannon identity, perhaps [see below] or else
merely one of several thousand Talon News
"misstatements").
The Advocate here presents the relevant additional portions of the
article:
However, Polier taped an interview with one of the major
television networks at Christmas substantiating the alleged affair.
The television network is trying to gather more proof of the charges
made by Polier before airing what would be potentially damaging to
the Kerry presidential campaign.
Polier has reportedly told friends that Kerry suggested she go to
Kenya, as Drudge detailed in his exclusive last week.
A source close to the television network said Polier's story is
compelling, but only if it can be proven to be true.
"She wants to tell her story," the source told The London
Sun. "She has talked at length about her relationship with
Kerry. But no one is believing her."
Kerry, who has been riding high as the front-runner winning 14 of 16
Democrat primaries, has distanced himself completely from the
charges of infidelity.
"I just deny it categorically," Kerry told reporters in
Wisconsin, where a primary election will take place on Tuesday.
"It's rumour. It's untrue. Period."
On Friday, Kerry appeared on the Don Imus radio talk show and flatly
denied the story regarding him and the intern.
"There's nothing to report," Kerry told Imus.
"There's nothing to talk about. I'm not worried about it."
When asked whether he would mind having a thorough investigation
into this alleged affair, Kerry said he has already been given a
closer look since becoming the Democrat front-runner.
"The answer is no," Kerry said. "I've been pretty
well vetted and examined from one side to the other."
Imus later told his national radio audience that Kerry's campaign is
"dead" if these allegations are found to be true.
Kerry campaign officials believe the Republican Party is
responsible for a "dirty tricks" campaign bringing up
these claims that Kerry was involved with Polier.
....
Yet Polier's parents, Terry and Donna Polier from Malvern,
Pennsylvania, acknowledged that Kerry had been involved with his
daughter.
"I think he's a sleazeball," exclaimed Terry Polier.
"I did wonder if she didn't get that feeling herself."
He added, "He's not the sort of guy I'd choose to be with my
daughter."
According to the intern's father, Kerry asked Polier to "be on
his reelection committee" but she "decided against
it."
Twenty members of the media from around the world traveled to
Malvern on Friday trying to obtain more information about the 1995
high school graduate and Kerry.
....
A Democratic colleague to Kerry in the U.S. Senate said Kerry should
reveal the whole truth about this before it is too late.
"Kerry needs to come clean and be absolutely clear about this
rumor and other ones now starting to surface," the anonymous
source told Insight Online. "We need to know flat out if he's
[fooled] around with women besides his wife."
Democratic strategists fear another sex scandal involving a
Democratic presidential candidate will invoke memories of former
President Bill Clinton, whose affair with intern Monica Lewinsky was
front-page news after first being revealed on The Drudge Report.
....
And Republican strategists say they will not pursue the
intern affair rumor, but believe the American people will be
instantly reminded of Clinton if the rumor is found to be
true.
"People's memories are not that short to forget the national
embarrassment Clinton caused and compounded with lies," a GOP
strategist told Insight Online. "We don't want to touch this
one with a ten foot pole but it'll be interesting to see if the
press pursues this further."
In the meantime, several news organizations have continued to
research these allegations as well as other instances of alleged
infidelity during Kerry's political career.
....
Talon News also reported on Friday that Kerry has
been linked to other alleged extramarital affairs in the past,
including Morgan Fairchild, Cornelia Guest, Patti Davis, Michele
Philips, Catherine Oxenberg and other young reporters.
Fascinating coverage!
So (according to Talon News) Polier's father called Kerry a "sleazeball,"
but then, according to Newsday (a wee bit more credible), he "support[ed]...Kerry's
candidacy for president."
Why didn't Talon News mention the endorsement?
Oh, and how about Talon News's "anonymous source" in the
Senate, allegedly a Democrat, who said, "Kerry should reveal
the whole truth about this before it is too late"?
Given what we know now, how much should we trust there was ever
any such anonymous source?
And how about Jeff Gannon's claim that "Polier taped an
interview with one of the major television networks at Christmas
substantiating the alleged affair"?
Really, Jeff?
Is that the ground-breaking television interview in which she said,
as she did to the Associated Press, "I have never had a
relationship with Senator Kerry, and the rumors in the press are
completely false," or is it the one which never happened at
all, except to the extent it was wishfully played and replayed over
and over again in your little incubator-shaped noggin?
Noticing a pattern, anyone?
And how many news organizations with representatives daily admitted
into the White House would speak of, without any sourcing
whatsoever, a presidential candidate being "linked to other
alleged extramarital affairs in the past, including Morgan
Fairchild, Cornelia Guest, Patti Davis, Michele Philips, Catherine
Oxenberg and other young reporters"?
Wasn't Michele Philips in The Mamas and The Papas?
What the hell is all that about?
[Pause].
Oh, we get it now.
You see, as Talon News reported, "Republican strategists say
they will not pursue the intern affair rumor"--so Talon News,
which works on behalf of "Republican strategists"
(actually, which was founded by a pair of Republican
strategists, Bobby Eberle and Bill Fairbrother) figured they'd do
the job for them.
Gee, where have we seen that sort of coordination before?
Hmm.
[Pause].
[Vague image of Mount Rushmore appears].
[Pause].
Anyway, on to South Dakota, where Gannon had already done plenty
of hosing of Democratic candidates by the time he and Talon News hit
up the scintillating John Kerry/Morgan Fairchild angle.
Indeed, when Gannon wasn't making up news in Washington, he was
generating his own news in South Dakota, using a false
name in an e-mail to the campaign of former Senate Minority
Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) and, it now appears, creating
his own news story by phoning in to a South Dakota radio
program.
As widely-published freelance writer Greg
Beato has written,
[on] this transcript from a South Dakota talk radio show called
"Argus on the Air" that aired on radio station KELO [on]
June 18th, 2003, note the caller's name ["Jim"]. Note the
very Gannon-like syntax of the non-question question. Note that on
June 18th, the only "national news" reporting on the
Daschle/Kranz story was coming from Gannon himself. Note also that
"Argus on the Air" streams it[s] show on the Web, and that
Gannon used to capture the stream and post it on his website
Jeffgannon.com.
Doubt it?
Well, let's look into this.
First, the name, "Jim." As in James. As in Jimmy Moore and
James Dale Guckert.
Second, the obscurity of the issue at the time "Jim"
raised it. Except, that is, to Jim Guckert, for whom it was,
undoubtedly, his everything. Well, apart from hot, $200-an-hour sex.
Third, the fact that at that exact time, that is, the
Summer of 2003, Gannon is confirmed to have used a false identity
with the Daschle campaign (see link above) to try to advance his
story about David Kranz and Tom Daschle, which no one else was
reporting at the time.
Fourth, note the fact that Gannon was familiar with the show, and
even--extraordinarily, for a "Washington beat
reporter"--offered streaming audio of the obscure
South Dakota program on his website.
[Can we just repeat that? The man had streaming audio of a
South Dakota radio show on his website].
Fifth, consider the question asked by "Jim" to the Sioux
Falls Argus Leader's Executive Director, Randall Beck, and compare
it (as Beato says) to the syntax, tone, and style of Gannon's questions
to Ari Fleischer, Scott McClellan, and President Bush.
[Transcript]:
HOST, GREG BELFRAGE: Good afternoon, Jim, you’re on Argus on
Air with Randall Beck of the Argus Leader.
"JIM": Thank you, Greg. I wanted to ask Randall about some
of these reports on national news lately. I generally like Beck’s
position on transparency and disclosure, but it seems that the Argus
has not been disclosing the past political affiliations of its main
political reporter, Dave Kranz, who always writes very slanted,
pro-Democratic stories, and I think it’s time for Beck to come
clean and explain to the people and to the readers of the Argus
where Kranz’s sympathies really lie and how they may affect the
reporting of the Argus. It’s time for some answers, Mr. Beck, and
I think you should stop dodging these questions and answer them
openly.
BECK: Is that a question or a comment?
"JIM": Are you going to fully disclose Mr. Kranz's
background, or are you going to keep stonewalling? I mean, you won't
even answer the questions from these reporters in Washington. What
have you got to hide? I thought you were for transparency.
BECK [Laughs]: Okay. Here we go. [Laughs]. Well, Jim, I'm pleased
that you called because the rest of the callers may not get a whole
lot of other chance[s] to talk about issues. But we’ll spend a few
minutes on this.
GREG: There will be some who don’t understand what Jim i[s]
talking about.
BECK: Absolutely. So, let me get to it. I'll quickly summarize it.
Jim is mistaken, actually, because it's actually not reporters who
are spreading this. It is actually generated by a guy, principally
by a guy named Neal Tapio who decided to run for Daschle's seat from
the Republican side. Neal and a small group of folks here in South
Dakota in concert with, well, it's a website out of Washington, are
basically saying that the Argus Leader is biased in favor of Daschle
and, more importantly for this discussion, saying that Dave Kranz
is, you know, since his days at South Dakota State [University], is
in bed with Tom Daschle, and we need to come clean and reveal this
incestuous relationship. I'm not going to repeat some of the crap,
quite honestly, that's being perpetuated. Because it's--never repeat
an error. We try not to do that in the paper.
....
[A] small [cabal] is dissatisfied with the facts [of Daschle's
alleged connection with Argus Leader reporter David Kranz] alone.
They want us to demonize Daschle because they are unhappy with the
fact that his wife is a lobbyist for a major national cooperation. I
cannot--you cannot, Greg, you cannot change that fact. We can argue
all day long whether there's a right and a wrong. The fact is it
exists. And unless we are able to spirit a reporter into Tom and
Linda's bedroom and catch them in the act of
plotting--conspiring--to ram through coverage or legislation that
personally benefits them, we can't imply that that happens. And
that's what the cabal--and I hate to use that word--that's what the
cabal wants us to do. And I won't do that.
Now, they have found an organization that will help them do
that. And that's a group out of D.C. called Talon News, and I use
the word "news" very loosely, but I have to say it because
it's in their name. It's actually a group of Republican party
functionaries that purport to cover the news and to report
things through the internet that reveal the vast left-wing
conspiracy against the Republicans. This is a group--and you can
find it on the web site, it's out there--that even the Republican
National Committee disavows. It is so far out there.
....
I want to go back to Talon News....a group of folks in D.C. and I
think elsewhere who push a certain agenda. This is a reflection, I
think, of how the internet has changed communication. We believe in
free speech in this country. I'm a strong advocate for freedom of
speech and freedom of the press. And quite honestly, you know, I
have to defend Talon News' right to do what it does no matter how
despicable and underhanded I see it manipulating the facts. I have
to defend their right to do that. That is one of the down sides of
living in a free society. But I can tell you, there is no
credibility there. There is no commitment to the facts. There is no
sense of fair play. It is an advocacy website with only one interest
in mind, and that is making not just Republicans but a certain
segment of Republicans look good and demonize everybody who doesn't
agree with them.
Remember, all this was in June of 2003.
Just a couple months after these
events, as related by White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer
to the news outlet Editor & Publisher on February 17th, 2005:
I found out that [Jeff Gannon] worked for a GOP site, and I
didn't think it was my place to call on him because he worked for
something that was related to the party. He had the editor [Bobby
Eberle] call me and made the case that they were not related to the
Republican Party. He said they used the GOP name for marketing
purposes only....[Eberle] assured me that they were not part of the
Republican Party...I don't think that party organizations should
have people in that room acting as reporters. They are advocates,
not reporters, and a line should be drawn. It looked like a
conservative news organization. If I thought that they were part of
the party, I would not have [resumed] calling on them.
GOPUSA--a news organization?
Not even Eberle believed that.
How could he "assure" Fleischer that GOPUSA.com was a news
site, when he created
Talon News in order to give GOPUSA.com a viable, separate, and
distinct "news" presence?
Indeed, The Advocate has previously revealed that the above
statement by Fleischer is a bold-faced lie. Fleischer told
Editor & Publisher, according to the site's description of their
interview with the former Press Secretary, that he made a decision
to continue calling on The Bulldog (Gannon) "after speaking
with Eberle and looking at Talon News...he was convinced that
GOPUSA.com and Talon News were not official party sites."
Except that Talon News didn't exist when Fleischer "looked
into" GOPUSA.com.
But hey, everybody lies.
Jeff
Gannon lies. Bobby
Eberle lies. Ari
Fleischer lies. Scott
McClellan lies. Sherry
Sylvester lies. Jon
Lauck lies. Alex
Conant lies. Andrew
Sullivan lies.
It's really pretty trivial, isn't it?
(b) Rush
Limbaugh
The fact that BC04 advisor Rush Limbaugh is the most widely
syndicated talk-radio host shows that the mainstream media (in radio)
is widely tolerant of GOP/Republican propagandists - without seeking
to correct that.
Here:
Rush Limbaugh Becomes Official Unpaid Advisor to Bush-Cheney
'04
September 13, 2004
I made an official announcement to
open the program today. I have become, and have been for a while
[eRiposte emphasis], an
official, unpaid advisor to the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign, and we
decided to go public with this because there's no problem with it
whatsoever.
Here:
Just one week after two Republican
members of Congress repudiated remarks by radio host Rush Limbaugh
(Limbaugh compared U.S. guards' abuse of Iraqi prisoners to a
college fraternity prank and suggested that the U.S. guards involved
were "blow[ing] some steam off"), Mary Matalin --
Bush-Cheney '04 campaign adviser, former assistant to President
George W. Bush, and former counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney
-- spoke as a guest on the May 21 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh
Show, calling Limbaugh her "hero"; mischaracterizing
coverage in The New York Times; and telling Limbaugh that, from his
show, "I get all the information I need."
...
MATALIN: This is a -- this is another
reason you're my hero, of all the reasons. I have to read these
papers every day because I have to do the defense to them?
RUSH: Yeah.
MATALIN: And it's not until I listen
to you that I actually can crack a smile for the first time in the
day.
...
Here:
WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) -
Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh is expected to visit
Afghanistan with the top U.S. aid official to spotlight America's
aid work there, officials said on Thursday.
Political commentator Mary Matalin, a
former White House aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, will also be
on the trip. She said she was not being paid to go and would pay her
own way to Dubai but she believed the U.S. government would cover
the cost of her visit to Afghanistan from there.
The Bush administration has come
under sharp criticism for the Education Department's payment of
$240,000 to conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to tout
President George W. Bush's education plan.
Spokesmen for Limbaugh were not
immediately available to comment.
"It's trying to get people to
pay attention to all the good things we are doing in
Afghanistan," a U.S. official who asked not to be named said of
the trip, which is expected to take place next week. "This is
just a different kind of outreach."
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