FREE AND FRAUDULENT

The piece, which started out on the front page of Sunday's New York Times and jumped to a huge inside spread taking up another page and half in the print edition, was so rich in illustrations of government propaganda airing as "news" on presumably independent TV stations that it was difficult to choose which to cite.

I intended to cite the most salient points. This, for instance:

In all, at least 20 federal agencies ... 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. ...

In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. ... 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. ...

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.

I intended to cite this, too:

[I]n 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. ...

[But] 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.

Then I tuned into this morning's broadcast of Democracy Now! and decided to let it do the heavy lifting for me. In an interview, John Stauber of PR Watch, which monitors the press, was as impressed with the piece as I was. Noting its wealth of detail about "the widespread use of fake news," he said the piece was "the first mainstream media exposé of any length and depth" on the subject. Additionally, he pointed out that it "really puts the wood to the Bush administration, which has spent $250 million" to create and distribute fake news.

Democracy Now! anchor Amy Goodman noted further what is even more frightening than the fraud perpetrated on viewers of TV news: It's hard to distinguish between the fake news produced by the government and the real news produced by independent TV stations. This was an acute observation the Times piece did not make. (It couldn't be expected to do everything.)

Anyway, I intended to finish right there. But I can't. I feel impelled to cite Karen Ryan -- a former ABC and PBS journalist who became a public relations consultant and impersonated a "reporter" in various government-produced "news" segments -- as the perfect illustration of an unwillingness to take personal responsibility for spreading "covert propaganda."

The Times notes that she "cringes at the phrase." She regards covert propaganda as "words for dictators and spies." She feels uncomfortable being called a "paid shill" for the Bush regime. Yet she says she feels she did nothing wrong. Is she to blame that her "segments on behalf of the government were broadcast a total of at least 64 times in the 40 largest television markets"? Is she to blame that even those, the Times reports, "do not fully capture the reach of her work?"

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."

The contradiction is mind-boggling. And Ryan is scarcely alone in failing to take personal responsibility. The Times cites two news directors, Kathy Lehmann Francis (recently of WDRB in Louisville, Ky.) and Mike Stutz (of KGTV in San Diego, Ca.), who claimed they "would never allow their news programs to be co-opted by segments fed from any outside party, let alone the government." Yet taken together, WDRB (a Fox affiliate) and KGTV (an ABC affiliate) showed a total of three dozen government- and corporate-produced "news" segments without revealing their origin to viewers.

One especially fascinating instance of domestic propagandizing came at WHBQ in Memphis, Tenn. The station appeared to have a reporter in Afghanistan interviewing Afghan women when, in fact, she was using footage of interviews conducted by the U.S. State Department. The reporter, furthermore, didn't know the government had produced them. "[She] 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," the Times reported.

Finally, to wrap up:

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.

One unit of 40 military reporters and producers -- the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service -- is "set up to send local stations news segments highlighting the accomplishments of [local] military members." Larry W. Gilliam, the unit's deputy director, told the Times, "We're the 'good news' people." They filed 50 stories last year, which "were broadcast 236 times in all" and reached 41 million U.S. households. Makes the Swift Boat ads look like child's play.

Meantime, Dear Leader and his minions have no intention of backing off. Just the other day, on a separate front, he appointed his Texas crony Karen Hughes to polish up the U.S. image abroad. He has tarnished America's reputation so badly it's doubtful even her well-known skills as a propagandist will help. But if it's any consolation, her job at the State Department -- undersecretary for "public diplomacy" -- will keep her too busy to pull fast ones on news directors in this country.