From the Betrothed Media Department, part one

[DrSmellThis]

This is interesting as an example of how our system works:



http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS

/01/07/bush.journalist.ap/index.html

[DrSmellThis]

January 7th, 2005 3:46 pm
Bush team scolded for disguised TV report

By Ceci Connolly /

[

color=#0000ff]Washington Post[/color]

WASHINGTON -- 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 which 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 Poling, managing associate general counsel at the Government Accountability Office. ''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 May, the Government Accountability Office concluded that the Department of Health and Human

Services violated two federal laws with similar fake news reports touting the administration's new Medicare drug

benefit. When that opinion was released, officials at the drug control office decided to stop the practice,

spokesman Thomas Riley said.

''Our lawyers disagree with the GAO interpretation," he said. Nevertheless, if

the video releases were going to be ''controversial or create an appearance of a problem," the agency decided it

was not worth pursuing, he said.

The prepackaged news pieces represent a fraction of the antidrug messages

distributed by the office, Riley said.

Production and distribution of the video news releases cost about

$155,000.

Riley said broadcast stations were fully aware they were receiving materials akin to printed press

releases that producers could ''slice and dice it however they want."

At least 300 news shows used some

portion of the prepackaged news reports, though it was impossible to determine how many aired the full 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 an authentic piece of

independent journalism.

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/

08/bush.journalist/index.html

The soldier on the ground takes the heat.

Why isn't anyone talking

about consequences for the Dept of Education, or their boss, who committed the far greater impropriety?

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/national/07drug.html?ex=1105765200&en=ab9c434646338c9b&ei=5 006&partner=ALT

AVISTA1

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20947/

[DrSmellThis]

January 28th, 2005 2:55 am
Third columnist caught with hand in the Bush till
Michael

McManus, conservative author of the syndicated column "Ethics & Religion," received $10,000 to promote a marriage

initiative.

</IMG>

By Eric

Boehlert / Salon

One

day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration

initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a

third embarrassing hire has emerged. Salon has confirmed that Michael McManus, a marriage advocate whose syndicated

column, "Ethics & Religion," appears in 50 newspapers, was hired as a subcontractor by the Department of Health and

Human Services to foster a Bush-approved marriage initiative. McManus championed the plan in his columns without

disclosing to readers he was being paid to help it succeed.

Responding to the latest revelation, Dr. Wade Horn,

assistant secretary for children and families at HHS, announced Thursday that HHS would institute a new policy that

forbids the agency from hiring any outside expert or consultant who has any working affiliation with the media. "I

needed to draw this bright line," Horn tells Salon. "The policy is being implemented and we're moving forward."



Horn's move came on the heels of Wednesday's

report in

the Washington Post that HHS had paid syndicated columnist and marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher $21,000 to write

brochures and essays and to brief government employees on the president's marriage initiative. Gallagher later

wrote in her column that she would have revealed the $21,000 payment to readers had she recalled receiving it.



The Gallagher revelation came just three weeks after USA Today reported that the Education Department, through a

contract with the Ketchum public relations firm, paid $240,000 to Armstrong Williams, a conservative

African-American print, radio and television pundit, to help promote Bush's No Child Left Behind program to

minority audiences.

To date, the Bush administration has paid public relation firms $250 million to help push

proposals, according to

a report

Thursday in USA Today. That's double what the Clinton administration spent on P.R. from 1997 to 2000. Shortly after

Williams' contract came to light, the Democrats on the Committee on Government Reform wrote a letter to President

Bush demanding that he "immediately provide to us all past and ongoing efforts to engage in covert propaganda,

whether through contracts with commentators, the distribution of video news releases, or other means." As of

Thursday, a staffer on the committee told Salon, there had been no response.

Horn says McManus, who could not

be reached for comment, was paid approximately $10,000 for his work as a subcontractor to the Lewin Group, a health

care consultancy hired by HHS to implement the Community Healthy Marriage Initiative, which encourages communities

to combat divorce through education and counseling. McManus provided training during two-day conferences in

Chattanooga, Tenn., and also made presentations at HHS-sponsored conferences. His syndicated column has appeared in

such papers as the Washington Times, the Dallas Morning News and the Charlotte Observer.

Horn, who has known

McManus for years, says he first learned about the payment on Thursday. In the wake of the Gallagher story, he asked

his staff to review all outside contracts and determine if there were any other columnists being paid by HHS. They

informed him about McManus. Horn says the review for similar contracts continues.

Horn insists that HHS was not

paying Gallagher and McManus to write about Bush administration initiatives but for their expertise as marriage

advocates. "We live in a complicated world and people wear many different hats," he says. "People who have expertise

might also be writing columns. The line has become increasingly blurred between who's a member of the media and who

is not. Thirty years ago if you were a columnist, then you were a full-time employee of a newspaper. Columnists

today are different."

The problem springs from the failure of both Gallagher and McManus to disclose their

government payments when writing about the Bush proposals. But one HHS critic says another dynamic has led to the

controversy, and a blurring of ethical and journalistic lines: Horn and HHS are hiring advocates -- not scholars --

from the pro-marriage movement. "They're ideological sympathizers who propagandize," says Tim Casey, attorney for

Legal Momentum, a women's rights organization. He describes McManus as being a member of the "extreme religious

right."

Horn denies the charge: "It's not true that we have just been selectively working with conservatives."

According to news accounts, the administration seeks to spend $1.5 billion promoting marriage through

marriage-enrichment courses, counseling and public-awareness campaigns.

In 1996, McManus co-founded

Marriage Savers, a conservative advocacy group,

which, among other things, urges clergy not to conduct a marriage ceremony unless the couple has had lengthy

counseling first. "The church should not be a 'wedding factory,' but a training ground for strong marriages to go

the distance -- for life," McManus wrote.

In his April 3, 2004, column, McManus wrote, "The Healthy Marriage

Initiative would provide funds to help those couples improve their skills of conflict resolution so they might

actually marry -- and be equipped to build a healthy marriage. Those skills can be taught by mentor couples in

churches for free. But for the non-religious, counselors would be paid."

A year earlier, McManus assured

readers that funds provided for the Healthy Marriage Initiative "could be used to teach skills to improve

communication and resolve conflict that would make the relationship happier and lead to a healthy marriage." He

based that assessment on comments made by HHS's Horn, who, indirectly, served as McManus' boss -- although that

relationship was never revealed to readers.

[DrSmellThis]

January 28th, 2005 8:14

pm
Pelosi: President Urged to Order Full Disclosure of Covert Propaganda

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28

/U.S. Newswire/ -- Today, the House Democratic

leadership and Ranking Democratic Members sent a letter to President Bush asking him to direct the release of all

contracts for secret publicity campaigns to promote Administration policies.

The text of the letter follows.



January 28, 2005

The President

The White House

Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

We

are writing to request that you direct each department and agency of the Executive Branch to disclose to the

appropriate Committee of the House of Representatives all public relations and advertising contracts signed during

your Administration.

Over the past year, multiple investigations have revealed that federal agencies have

employed secret publicity campaigns to promote administration priorities.

In separate analyses, the Government

Accountability Office found that the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House Office of National

Drug Control Policy violated the congressional prohibition on publicity and propaganda by distributing fabricated

video news reports.(1)

An investigative report by USA Today revealed that the Department of Education paid a

conservative commentator to support the No Child Left Behind Act in television and radio appearances.(2)



Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported the Department of Health and Human Services had a contract with a

syndicated columnist who promoted the President's marriage initiative.(3)

A newly released congressional

report found that public relations spending has more than doubled during the Bush Administration.(4)

And today,

USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com reported that the Department of Health and Human Services paid

another conservative commentator thousands of dollars to support the marriage initiative, including by speaking

about the importance of marriage to churches and community organizations.(5)

These developments raise serious

concerns. Covert propaganda campaigns are unethical and illegal. Those disclosed to date mislead the American people

about public policy and deceive the news media and press about the credibility of critiques of Administration

policies. We very much hope the contracts revealed to this point are an aberration and not part of a pattern across

federal agencies.

To assist us in understanding the scope of public relations and propaganda contracted for by

federal agencies, we request that you provide to the Democratic Leader, and to the appropriate Committee of

jurisdiction, the following:

(1) All contracts executed during the Bush Administration with public relations

firms, advertising agencies, public opinion research firms, media organizations, and individual members of the

media, including any modifications of such contracts.

(2) All subcontracts executed under the contracts

identified under (1), including any modifications of such subcontracts.

(3) Any documents or communications that

describe or assess the work performed under these contracts and subcontracts.

(4) A copy of the justification

and approval documents for any of these contracts entered into using less than full and open competition.

The

possibility of a widespread practice of covert propaganda raises the most serious of concerns. The Congress, the

press, and the American people all deserve a full disclosure of the Administration's policy on such propaganda.



It has already been nearly one month since the Democratic Leader and Ranking Members Henry Waxman, George Miller,

David Obey, and Elijah Cummings wrote to you requesting full disclosure of these contracts.(6) To date, we have

received no reply to that inquiry. Now that there have been additional revelations, we would appreciate your

cooperation with this inquiry, and would appreciate a complete response by March 1, 2005.

Sincerely,

Rep.

Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic Leader

Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, House Democratic Whip

Rep. Robert Menendez,

Chairman, House Democratic Caucus

Rep. James E. Clyburn, Vice Chair, House Democratic Caucus

Rep. Rosa

DeLauro, Co-Chair, Steering and Policy Committee

Rep. Dave R. Obey, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on

Appropriations

Rep. Ike Skelton, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Armed Services

Rep. John M. Spratt,

Jr., Ranking Minority Member, Committee on the Budget

Rep. George Miller, Ranking Minority Member Committee on

Education and the Workforce

Rep. John D. Dingell, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Energy and Commerce



Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Government Reform

Rep. Bennie Thompson, Ranking

Minority Member, Committee on Homeland Security

Rep. Juanita Millender-McDonald, Ranking Minority Member,

Committee on House Administration

Rep. Tom Lantos, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on International

Relations

Rep. John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Minority Member, Committee on the Judiciary

Rep. Louise McIntosh

Slaughter, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Rules

Rep. Bart Gordon, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on

Science

Rep. Nydia M. Velazquez, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Small Business

Rep. James L.

Oberstar, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Transportation

Rep. Lane Evans, Ranking Minority Member,

Committee on Veterans' Affairs

Rep. Charles B. Rangel, Ranking Minority Member, Committee on Ways and Means

[DrSmellThis]

February 2nd, 2005 4:49 pm
White House-friendly reporter under scrutiny
By Charlie Savage and

Alan Wirzbicki /

Boston Globe

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has provided White House media

credentials to a man who has virtually no journalistic background, asks softball questions to the president and his

spokesman in the midst of contentious news conferences, and routinely reprints long passages verbatim from official

press releases as original news articles on his website.
Jeff Gannon calls himself the White House correspondent

for TalonNews.com, a website that says it is "committed to delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage to our

readers." It is operated by a Texas-based Republican Party delegate and political activist who also runs GOPUSA.com,

a website that touts itself as "bringing the conservative message to America."

Called on last week by President

Bush at a press conference, Gannon attacked Democratic Senate leaders and called them "divorced from reality."

During the presidential campaign, when called on by Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Gannon linked Senator John F.

Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to Jane Fonda and questioned why anyone would dispute Bush's National Guard

service.

Now, the question of how Gannon gets into White House press conferences is coming under intense scrutiny

from critics who contend that Gannon is not a journalist but rather a White House tool to soften media coverage of

Bush. The issue was raised by a media watchdog group and picked up by Internet bloggers, who linked Gannon's

presence in White House briefings to recent controversies over whether the administration manipulates the flow of

information to the public.

These include the disclosure that the Education Department secretly paid columnist

Armstrong Williams to promote its education policy and the administration's practice of sending out video press

releases about its policies that purport to be "news stories" by fake journalists.

McClellan said Gannon has not

been issued -- nor requested -- a regular "hard pass" to the White House, and instead has come in for the past two

years on daily passes. Daily passes, he said, may be issued to anyone who writes for an organization that publishes

regularly and who is cleared to enter the building.

He said other reporters and political commentators from

lesser-known newsletters and from across the political spectrum also attend briefings, though he could not recall

any Internet bloggers. McClellan said it is not the White House's role to decide who is and who is not a real

journalist and dismissed any notion of conspiracy.

Nonetheless, transcripts of White House briefings indicate

that McClellan often calls on Gannon and that the press secretary -- and the president -- have found relief in a

question from Gannon after critical lines of questioning from mainstream news organizations.

When Bush called on

Gannon near the end of his nationally televised Jan. 26 news conference, he had just been questioned about Williams

and the Education Department funds, an embarrassment to the administration. Gannon's question was

different.

"Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy," Gannon said.

"[Minority Leader] Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being

on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no

crisis there. How are you going to work -- you said you're going to reach out to these people -- how are you going

to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"

As it turned out, Reid had never talked

about soup lines. That was a phrase attributed to him in satire by Rush Limbaugh on his radio show.

Last year,

during the presidential campaign, Gannon's comments could be even more pointed. In a Feb. 10, 2004, briefing with

McClellan, for example, Gannon rose to deliver the following:

"Since there have been so many questions about what

the president was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National

Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda, denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before

Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else's medals at the White

House to protest a war America was still fighting?"

David Brock, the former investigative journalist who made his

name revealing aspects of former President Bill Clinton's extramarital affairs, said he was watching last week's

press conference on television and the "soup lines" question sparked his interest because it "struck me as so

extremely biased." Brock asked his media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, to look into Talon News.

It

quickly discovered two things, he said. First, both Talon and the political organization GOP USA were run by a Texas

Republican activist and party delegate named Bobby Eberle. Second, many of the reports Gannon filed for Talon News

"appeared to be lifted verbatim from various White House and Republican political committee documents."

Eberle

did not return phone calls yesterday, and Gannon declined to comment. He did reply to Brock's group on his personal

blog: "In many cases I have liberally used the verbiage provided on key aspects of the issue because it is the

precise expression of where the White House stands -- free of any 'spin.' It's the ultimate in journalistic

honesty -- unvarnished and unfiltered. If only others would be as forthcoming."

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/02/04/web.us

/index.html

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITIC

S/02/09/white.house.reporter/index.html

[DrSmellThis]

Under Bush, a

New Age of Prepackaged TV News
By David Barstow and Robin Stein /

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." 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.

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. 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.



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.

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 - sound bites and raw video.

Since the shift, he said, even more State Department material is making its way into news broadcasts.

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.

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.''

Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for

this article.

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.nytimes.com/imag

epages/2005/03/12/politics/20050313cover_graphic.html

This is disturbing stuff. Our TV news is now being

generated directly by the government. This is obscene in a "democracy." It even happened, albeit to a much lesser

extent, under the Clinton administration. Why are people not screaming about this? Do we like being brainwashed

sheep? Empower yourselves, people!

[DrSmellThis]

WASHINGTON

(AP)

-- The White House on Monday defended the administration's use of video news releases that are sent to television

stations across the country and frequently used without any acknowledgment of the government's role in their

production.

In an opinion last week, the Justice Department concluded that the practice was appropriate as long

as the videos presented factual information about government programs. The memo was sent to heads of federal

departments and agencies.

"The prohibition does not apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint,

and therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning the programs administered by

an agency," according to the Justice Department memo.

The advice conflicts with the opinion of the Government

Accountability Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress. The GAO says that video news releases amount to

illegal "covert propaganda" when they fail to make plain that the government is behind the releases.

Questions

have been raised about government media practices after the revelation that conservative columnists were paid to

promote administration policies and did not tell their audiences that they had received federal money. President

Bush, after the practice was disclosed, said it was wrong and ordered that it stop.

The video news releases --

from the Pentagon, Agriculture Department, Census Bureau and other agencies -- have the appearance of other segments

in news programs and frequently are not identified by local stations as being produced by the government.

White

House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested the lack of disclosure was the fault of the broadcasters, not the

government.

"Many federal agencies have used this for quite some time as an informational tool to provide

factual information to the American people," he said. "And my understanding is that when these informational

releases are sent out that it's very clear to the TV stations where they are coming from."

He said the Justice

Department opinion on the video releases noted "the importance of making sure that it is factual information and not

crossing the line into advocacy."

Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Frank Lautenberg of New

Jersey criticized the Justice Department's memo and asked Bush to order that it be rescinded.

"It is wrong to

deceive the public with the creation of a phony news story," the lawmakers wrote. "It is also illegal."

State

Department spokesman Richard Boucher said agency videos include "basic facts and material on what's going on in

Afghanistan or Iraq or, often in the United States, related to important issues." He said the material is not

propaganda and is clearly marked as coming from the U.S. government.

Boucher said Secretary of State

Condoleezza Rice believes more transparency is better. "And so we've actually moved even beyond that and to start

putting some kind of an intro screen to everything that says it's brought to you by the Department of State so that

anybody who gets that video will know where it came from," he said.

[Holmes]

Why are people

not screaming about this? Do we like being brainwashed sheep?

As long as it doesn't involve any

actual thought, yes.

Disturbing, to say the least.

[InternationalPlayboy]

I think that's one

reason Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart receive so much media attention. It distracts the masses from the

important stuff and keeps them from realizing they're being manipulated.

I was trying to remember the slogan

from "Brave New World" or "1984" or whatever it was. Something like "War is Peace," etc.

[a.k.a.]

http://w

ww.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/03/12/politics/20050313cover_graphic.html

This is disturbing stuff. Our

TV news is now being generated directly by the government. This is obscene in a "democracy." It even happened,

albeit to a much lesser extent, under the Clinton administration. Why are people not screaming about this? Do we

like being brainwashed sheep? Empower yourselves, people!

Apparently we like it so much, we’re

willing to pay for it twice. Once with our taxes and the second time in cable fees. (Maybe even three times if we

buy the sponsors’ products.)

[a.k.a.]

Anyway, it makes perfect sense from

a business perspective. Why pay for reporters, investigators, film crews and etc. when you can just get the finished

product handed to you by the government?

Television news has never been about informing the public.

It’s always been about delivering an audience to advertisers.

[koolking1]

submitted by John Stauber on Mon, 03/14/2005 - 15:21.
Topics: U.S. government | public relations
The Center

for Media and Democracy is working with Free Press to gather a quarter million signatures on our petition mobilizing

the American public to fight fake news and government propaganda. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that at

least 20 federal agencies have made and distributed pre-packaged, ready-to-serve television news segments to promote

President Bush's policies and initiatives. Congress' Government Accountability Office determined that these "video

news releases" were illegal "covert propaganda" and told federal agencies to stop. But last Friday, the White House

ordered all agencies to disregard Congress' directive. The Bush administration is using hundreds of millions of

your tax dollars to manipulate public opinion. Here's how to stop them.

Sign our petition and help us get

250,000 people to join our call to Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and local television stations.

Tell Congress and the FCC to toughen and enforce laws against "covert propaganda" and demand that broadcasters come

clean with viewers about using government-produced news. Join others in your community to create "citizen

agreements" with your local TV stations to stop fake news broadcasts. These agreements are official documents filed

at the FCC that -- if broken -- can be used to deny license renewals. Free Press will connect you with others in

your area working to ensure local broadcasters identify the sources behind the "news."

Unless we speak out

now, the White House will continue to act with impunity -- taking advantage of understaffed and incautious local

news operations to manipulate public opinion. Please take a few moments to sign the petition and forward this

message to everyone you know. To learn more, read the in-depth report from Free Press on the systematic effort by

the Bush administration to manipulate journalists and the American public.

[DrSmellThis]

Thanks!! Do you have a link to

sign the petition?

This is absolutely disgusting, but at least they're consistent.

[koolking1]

http://www.freepress.net/action/petition.php?n=fakenews

I was hoping the link would be imbedded

(sorry about the curse word there).

[Pancho1188]

WAR IS

PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS

STRENGTH

--- 1984

[InternationalPlayboy]

Thanks Pancho,

that's it!

[DrSmellThis]

http://www.freepress.net/action/pet

ition.php?n=fakenews

I was hoping the link would be imbedded (sorry about the curse word

there).

That has got to be the lamest, cheesiest joke ever told at love-scent!

[DrSmellThis]

By Donna De La Cruz /

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Congressional investigators will look into

whether the Bush administration violated any laws when it paid syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher to help promote

a marriage initiative, Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy and Frank Lautenberg said.

The Government Accountability

Office told the two senators, who had requested the inquiry, that it would investigate in a letter sent to their

offices late Thursday.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, is already looking into the Education

Department's relationship with several public relations firms, which includes the agency's $240,000 contract with

syndicated columnist and TV personality Armstrong Williams. The Education Department had hired Williams to promote

the No Child Left Behind law.

The two senators had asked the GAO to expand its investigation to include

Gallagher.

Gallagher apologized in January to readers for not disclosing a $21,500 contract with the Health and

Human Services Department to help create materials promoting the agency's $300 million initiative to encourage

marriage. Gallagher said she was not paid to promote marriage but to write articles and brochures.

"My lifelong

experience in marriage research, public education and advocacy is the reason HHS hired me," she wrote in her column.



The GAO said its investigation of Gallagher will focus on whether her contract with HHS violated federal law

banning the use of public money for publicity or propaganda.

Lautenberg said the Bush administration has

violated the trust of the American people.

"The Bush administration is manufacturing propaganda, plain and

simple," said Lautenberg, of New Jersey.

"The president should put in place sound policies that benefit all

Americans rather than pay the press to promote bad policies," said Kennedy of Massachusetts. No one answered the

telephone at the White House press office Friday regarding comment on the GAO investigation.

[DrSmellThis]

And check this out. CBS reported the Schiavo story using a "reporter" contracted by Jeb Bush:



Journalist Is Contractor With Officials in Florida
By Chris Davis and Matthew Doig /

New York Times

At

the same time one of Florida's most visible television reporters brought news to viewers around the state, he

earned nearly a million dollars from the government agencies he covered.

The reporter, 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 last 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 Mr. Vasilinda's news reports. Mr.

Vasilinda, a freelance journalist, was also paid to work on campaign advertisements 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 film the weekly drawing for the Florida Lottery.

Meanwhile, Mr. Vasilinda's reports continued to

be shown on CNN and most Florida NBC stations.

On Friday, Mr. Vasilinda told

The

Sarasota Herald-Tribune that his business dealings with state government did not 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," he 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 Mr. Vasilinda's

state government work "certainly raises some red flags."

"Journalists should be guided by a principle of

independence," Professor Steele said, "and their primary loyalty should be to the public. When journalists have

loyalties to a government office or government agencies, those competing loyalties can undermine journalistic

independence."

Mr. Vasilinda sells his reports through Capitol News Service, the television news company he

founded and runs in Tallahassee. NBC and other stations subscribe to Capitol News Service and can then download and

broadcast any segments done by Mr. Vasilinda's company.

Mr. Steele said Mr. Vasilinda's government contracts

were the latest blow to the credibility of news organizations following disclosures this year that three journalists

were accepting government contracts to promote programs.

In January, USA Today reported that the federal

Education Department had paid a conservative columnist, Armstrong Williams, $240,000 to promote the No Child Left

Behind education law. Two more conservative columnists were later found to have accepted money to promote President

Bush's beliefs on marriage.

Mr. Vasilinda said his situation was nothing like Mr. Williams's because he had

not personally promoted any government programs or appeared in any of the videos his business produced.

"No one

has ever suggested that our coverage, in any way, is soft on anybody," Mr. Vasilinda said.

Many of the agencies

that have contracted with Mr. Vasilinda were unable to provide details of the contracts.

In January, a

Herald-Tribune reporter left repeated messages with Governor Bush's spokeswoman, Alia Faraj, requesting information

about whether any journalists had received money from state agencies.

Ms. Faraj, who worked for Mr. Vasilinda

at Capitol News Service before she was hired by the Bush administration, never responded. She also did not return

calls Friday seeking comment for this article.

Denver Stutler, Governor Bush's chief of staff, did not return

a phone call Monday. State officials from several agencies said Vasilinda Productions had created promotional

videos, filmed public service announcements featuring government officials and made copies of videos and compact

discs for agencies.

Vasilinda Productions produced a back-to-school video several years ago featuring Education

Commissioner Charlie Crist, who later became attorney general and is considered a contender for governor in 2006.



The fact that Mr. Vasilinda works for government agencies is widely known among reporters and government officials

in Tallahassee. But viewers around the state have never been told of Mr. 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 those contracts and would not comment on them until they had more

information.

CNN, which broadcast a Vasilinda report on Terri Schiavo on Thursday, did not respond on Monday to

questions from The Herald-Tribune.

[DrSmellThis]

By Laurie Kellman /

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Senate passed a measure Thursday that would

stop government agencies from using taxpayer funds to disguise video press releases as real news, putting the brakes

on a product Democrats call propaganda. President Bush cautioned that some responsibility for full disclosure rests

with news outlets.

"It's deceptive to the American people if it's not disclosed," Bush told the American

Society of Newspaper Editors on Thursday. "But it's incumbent upon people who use them to say, 'This news clip was

produced by the federal government.'"

Senators voted 98-0 to attach the measure, sponsored by Sen. Robert

Byrd, D-W.Va., to the $80.6 billion emergency spending bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under it,

taxpayer funds would be prohibited from being used for prepackaged news stories unless those stories contain "clear

notification within the text or audio of the prepackaged news" that discloses it was prepared or funded by a federal

agency.

That way, said Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the authors of the packages

cannot be held liable for news outlets that do not disclose the funding source on their own.

The amendment

writes into law a Government Accountability Office opinion that said the Bush administration has violated rules

against "publicity and propaganda" with releases from several agencies.

The Office of National Drug Control

Policy, for example, released a series of videos in which a narrator, sometimes identified as "Karen Ryan," said she

was "reporting" on the office's activities. Separately, the Health and Human Services Department's Centers for

Medicare and Medicaid Services produced video news releases, also narrated by "Karen Ryan," touting changes to

Medicare.

The tapes were offered to local television stations for news programs. Some stations aired the videos

without identifying their government origins.

The White House Office of Management and Budget on March 11

countered that the GAO report "fails to recognize the distinction between covert propaganda and purely informational

video news reports."

In other action on the spending bill, the Senate voted to:

_Prohibit military

hospitals from charging soldiers wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan for meals.

_Change the name of the death

benefit given to soldiers' families from "death gratuity" to "fallen hero compensation." _Provide $5 million to

promote democracy in Lebanon.

[DrSmellThis]

The press takes a pass on

'Jeff Gannon'
By Carol Towarnicky /

Philadelphia Daily News

IF

A REPORTER who doubled as a gay hooker had visited the Clinton White House nearly 200 times, think it would have

made the news?

If "Jeff Gannon"/James D. Guckert had been unveiled, so to speak, as a liberal imposter who

lobbed softball questions at Clinton administration press briefings, he would be as infamous as Michael Schiavo.



And if 39 of those White House visits were mysteriously unrelated to his "reporting" duties, imagine what

innuendoes would be issuing forth from Planet Limbaugh. Imagine the organized phone call campaign demanding

newspapers and TV stations report the story.

But Gannon/Guckert isn't being unveiled or innuendoed or even

blipped on media radar screens, even among liberals.

Last Sunday was the third time in recent weeks that I came

across hyper-informed liberals who have not heard the first thing about Guckert, who used the name "Jeff Gannon" to

pose as a newsman from a Web site that was in reality a Republican Party front. Gannon advertised his second job as

a male escort on Web sites complete with full frontal photos.

For months, Gannon/Guckert asked obviously biased

questions at press briefings. He was conveniently ready when Bush spokesman Scott McClellan was being pressed too

hard by reporters. Apparently none of those reporters ever thought to check out the obvious ringer in their midst.

It was only when Gannon asked one of his trademark questions at a nationally televised presidential press conference

in February that some bloggers noticed.

It didn't take much digging for them to uncover Gannon's

not-so-secret identity and ask the obvious: Did the Secret Service have this information? Did the White House? But

the story went nowhere then and is going nowhere now.

Just last week, a Freedom of Information Act search

requested by two members of Congress revealed that Gannon/Guckert visited the White House 196 times - 39 of them

days when there were no press briefings. While liberal blogs made much of the news, a Nexis search found that the

Associated Press gave it only three paragraphs, which were picked up by only two newspapers nationwide. CNN

mentioned the story only to say that the blogs had it. On MSNBC's "Countdown," Washington Post reporter Dana

Milbank offered excuses for the 14 times that Gannon/Guckert's entries or exits weren't recorded by White House

security and host Keith Olbermann seemed apologetic for bringing it up.

If reporters aren't worried about

imposter journalists, at least they should smell a good story in a possible White House security breach.

With

an explosion of media, much of it partisan, the role of actual journalism becomes even more critical. Yet the bright

line between news and fair comment on one hand versus manipulation and propaganda on the other has all but

disappeared.

Of course, Gannon/Guckert was only the most flamboyant of phony journalists to grace our airwaves

in recent months: There are the paid hacks who got government money to laud government programs in their columns;

there were the government video news releases made to look like actual TV reports - and which were run on many

smaller stations.

Journalists get hopping-mad if CIA agents masquerade as reporters in war zones - it puts them

at high risk. Yet these same journalists seem almost blasé at the assault on truth zones every day at the White

House, on Capitol Hill and on a TV screen near you. At a time when the radicals of the right, aided by the White

House, seek to eviscerate constitutional protections, the news media have found a curious way to protect the First

Amendment: Don't worry that Congress will abridge freedom of the press; The press will do the job of abridging

itself all on its own.

[DrSmellThis]

News as Commodity +

Pervasive Information Control = Loss of Democracy

by Joseph Miller

We’re more and more at risk of losing

our democracy. The executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government are supposed to act as checks and

balances on one another, but increasingly don’t. The First Amendment intended that a free press provide an

additional level of checks and balances, but this too is increasingly failing.

As Bill Moyers and many others

have noted, democracy can’t survive unless the press -- the print and broadcast media -- do their job. Democracy

can’t survive unless citizens have access to honest information about the stories that really matter: stories about

the real actions and policies of our government and corporations; about the validity of justifications offered for

going to war; about what’s really happening in our economy and the environment; about the fairness and honesty of

our elections. The list goes on and on.

So why aren’t the mainstream news media doing their job? There are at

least seven broad and interrelated reasons.

One. News divisions are located within media conglomerates that are

increasingly driven primarily by the bottom line. Readership and audience size is already decreasing for many in the

traditional print and broadcast media. Such media don’t want to do anything that might offend or further reduce

their audience and thus reduce advertising revenue. Such concerns lead to a reluctance to cover, sometimes an

unwillingness to cover, stories viewed as sensitive or controversial.

Two. Post 9/11, and now with the ongoing

“war on terror,” media consultants have explicitly encouraged outlets to brand themselves as patriotic in the

flag-waving, unquestioned support, dissent is unacceptable, sense. This branding has increased audience share for

conglomerates such as Fox and Clear Channel, and has encouraged other outlets to follow their lead. It’s also led to

self-censorship, however, and an abridgement of the press’ obligation to provide citizens with accurate information

for informed democratic participation.

Three. This patriotic branding works particularly well for conglomerates

such as Fox, Clear Channel, and Sinclair which have a strong conservative bias to begin with. These outlets then

market their bias in parts of the country that are leaning or moving to the right, resulting in an audience that

becomes even more conservative and polarized. In order for other media to compete for this audience, they then have

to move to the right, in which case the “news” drifts further and further to the right, and dissent becomes less and

less acceptable.

Four. Another way to increase audience share is to package and deliver the news as

entertainment. In news as entertainment, and as described by Elliot Cohen in News Incorporated, news is seen more as

a commodity to increase market share than as a First Amendment citizen right or journalistic responsibility. In news

as entertainment, news is evaluated more on appearance and impression than on substance or meaningful analysis, more

on conforming to the status quo than on questioning the status quo.

Five. News as entertaining sound-bites,

news as competing pundits, news as repackaged corporate and governmental news releases is cheaper to produce. More

thoughtful news, probing news, news with contextual perspective and analysis requires more time, money, and staff to

produce. For these and other reasons the number of real journalists in the mainstream media is getting smaller and

smaller.

Six. News as entertainment requires a lot less audience attention and investment than news as extended

analysis. Because it requires less attention and investment, news as entertainment, news as headlines, is a better

fit in the narrow sense for the fast-paced, overloaded nature of many of our lives. This becomes self perpetuating,

and the type of “news” people receive increasingly determines the type of “news” people expect to receive and

prefer, i.e., news as entertainment.

Seven. The media and, by extension, the “news” is increasingly about

ratings. To break the story first, to get the interviews, to be the recipient of “leaks,” you need access. Access

may be reduced or denied altogether if you’re too critical of the official government or corporate line.

I’ve

described seven reasons why the corporate-owned mainstream press isn’t doing its job. The press is also not doing

its job, however, because the political parties and those in power want it that way. Both have become increasingly

adept at information control -- at promoting their policies through controlling the information that the press, and

thus the public, receives. This has been going on for a long time and has been true of both parties, and both

Democratic and Republican occupants in the White House.

Conservatives have been particularly successful at

information control. As described by David Brock, Don Hazen, and others, since the early 70s the right has created a

powerful network of think-tanks, leadership groups, donors, and secular and religious media outlets and spokespeople

to articulate, support and echo its message -- “to stay on message.”

Not only do conservatives stay on message,

they’re very clever at “framing” the message and controlling the debate. Thus, when the President wanted to cut

taxes primarily for the wealthy, he refocused and reframed the discussion from the ways that society benefits from

taxes, and why those that benefit the most should pay the most, to taxes as an “affliction.” The linguist George

Lakoff notes in a September, 2004, Boston Globe article that the term “tax relief” began “appearing in White House

press releases the day President Bush took office… For there to be “relief” there must be an affliction, an

afflicted party harmed by the affliction, and a reliever who takes the affliction away and is therefore a hero. And

if anybody tries to stop the reliever, he’s a villain wanting the suffering to go on. Add “tax” to the mix and you

have a metaphorical frame: Taxation as an affliction, the taxpayer as the afflicted party, the president as the

hero, and the Democrats as the villains. Every time you hear the term, those subliminal meanings resonate. Once the

campaign repeats the words day after day, they end up in every newspaper and on every TV and radio station, and the

term becomes the way TV commentators and journalists talk about taxes. And pretty soon the Democrats are forced to

talk about their own brand of “tax relief.”

Information control is also achieved by “information dominance.”

Danny Schechter, Ken Herman, and others note that regardless of the area, the administration controls the narrative,

the images, the access, and the outcomes depicted. Think about the political rallies prior to the election, or the

“conversations,” “forums,” or “town hall meetings” currently being held to sell social security “reform.” All these

events are held at tax-payer expense. All are heavily wrapped in the rhetoric of democracy, and yet all are ticketed

events with tickets going only to supporters. Democracy and openness are precluded. Each of these events is designed

to provide an extended set of words and images to the mainstream media that can be repeated over and over to project

the controlled, managed, staged message the administration wants to plant.

Other information dominance

strategies are also in use. For example, information that challenges administrative policies is denied to citizens

by removing the information from websites, or classification as “secret.” Similarly, citizen requests for some types

of constitutionally guaranteed information increasingly encounter delays, roadblocks, or complete non-compliance

(i.e., stonewalling). Some types of threatening images (e.g., returning coffins) or information (e.g., civilian

deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq) are just brazenly prohibited. Finally, if you’re a journalist and your questions are

too threatening, too on-target, various forms of intimidation may be used to get you, and others who might see you

as a model, to “back-off.”

Another form of information control is “fake news.” As documented by the Center for

Media and Democracy, the use of public relations firms to achieve political objectives has a long history. The Bush

Administration has raised such uses to new heights, however, spending more than $250 million during its first term

to achieve additional information dominance.

Public relations firms have been used to create “fake news” in two

ways. One way is to contract with PR firms to promote administration policies, and then have the firms contract with

newspaper columnists or TV newspeople to work the promotions into the “news,” but without disclosing they’re doing a

paid promotion. Thus, Diane Farsetta recently reported on alternet.org that conservative syndicated commentator

Armstrong Williams recently lost his newspaper column when it was discovered that he was paid $240,000 as part of a

one million dollar contract between the Ketchum public relations firm and the Education Department to promote the

“No Child Left Behind” law.

While several cases of Williams-like “fake news” have been discovered, literally

hundreds of cases of the second type of “fake news” -- government produced, pre-packaged TV news segments -- have

recently received attention. Thus, on Sunday, March 13, The New York Times ran a front page story revealing that “at

least 20 federal agencies… have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four

years…Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the

government’s role in their production.” [The 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… [The reports] 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.”

Think about what’s happening here. Hundreds of stories produced at taxpayer expense

extolling the virtues of the administration’s domestic and foreign policies without any hint of criticism or

controversy, and with no acknowledgement by the TV stations that the segments were produced by the government. This

is really significant. It’s also against the law. As reported by Amy Goodman and John Stauber in a March 14th

Democracy Now! interview, the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 prohibits government propaganda directed at its own population

(see also “Stop News Fraud” at freepress.net). I’ll describe just one additional case of “fake news” -- a truly

outrageous case. The case I’m referring to, of course, is that of Jeff Gannon, an individual whom bloggers later

established was really James Guckert. As described by Media Matters for America and others, Gannon/Guckert received

a press pass for two years to attend White House briefings. While at such briefings, Gannon/Guckert’s role seems to

have been to ask questions that either promoted the administration, or smeared its opponents. Investigations

continue on why Gannon/Guckert was issued press credentials when the web site he worked for -- Talon News -- had

little if any audience and why he was allowed to sign-in at the White House every day as James Guckert, but ask

questions in news briefings as Jeff Gannon.

But enough focus on the negative -- on ways we’re losing our

democracy and country. Let’s switch our focus, and talk about five things we can do to regain our democracy, our

country.

One. Democracy is based upon informed citizen action. Many of us receive much of our information from

the online alternative and independent media. We each need to identify the sites we view as responsible, reliable,

and trustworthy. The following are but a few of the many excellent sites I would recommend: CommonDreams.org,

AlterNet, Tom Paine.common sense, Truthout, Center for Media and Democracy, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting,

Democracy Now, Center for Public Integrity, MediaChannel, American Progress Action Fund, The Nation, The American

Prospect, In These Times and Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures.

Two. The alternative and independent media

need our support. We need to support them, ourselves, democracy, and media reform through subscriptions,

memberships, purchases, and donations.

Three. We need to join with others and create forums where issues and

actions can be discussed and planned. One such event is

The National Conference for Media Reform

sponsored by freepress.net in St. Louis, Missouri, on May 13-15.

Four. We need to join with others in every

possible place -- homes, churches, libraries, colleges, etc. -- to view and discuss some of the excellent

documentaries that are available. A few of the many I would recommend include: Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear &

the Selling of American Empire; Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War; Unconstitutional: The War on Our

Civil Liberties; Independent Media in a Time of War; and Weapons of Mass Deception. All of the preceding can be

inexpensively purchased, or borrowed for free at thefilmconnection.org – a collaboration between YES! magazine and

The Film Connection.

Five. As Jeffrey Chester and Gary Larson argue in the Spring, 2005 issue of YES! Magazine,

we need to make certain that affordable high-speed Internet service is available to all citizens -- wealthy and

non-wealthy, urban and rural. We also need to ensure that telephone and cable broadband carriers provide “open

access” to all Internet service providers (ISPs) and all Internet content and services. Several important potential

restrictions to open broadband Internet access are currently being considered by the Federal Communications

Commission and many state legislatures, and one important type of restriction will soon be debated by the Supreme

Court. Excellent coverage of these and other threats to media democracy -- and thus our democracy – is available at

the websites of the Media Access Project and the Center for Digital Democracy. The above comments appeared in the

April/May edition of “Common Sense”, the Independent Monthly at the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary's

College. The comments are a revised and condensed version of comments presented at the Midwest Peace Summit at

Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis on March 18-20. Additional resources were also distributed and

are available. Joseph Miller is Chair of the Department of Psychology at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame,

IN. He can be contacted at jmiller@saintmarys.edu.