Source: Bill Moyers "NOW" 12/17/04
Bush administration officials said yesterday that revisions to reports on climate change made by Philip A. Cooney, a former oil-industry lobbyist now working at the White House, were part of the normal review before publishing projects that involved many agencies.
Mr. Cooney, 45, is chief of staff to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which helps shape and carry out the president's environmental policies. A lawyer with no scientific training, he moved to the White House in 2001 after having worked for more than 10 years for the American Petroleum Institute, the oil-industry lobby. His last title there was climate team leader, and his focus was defeating plans to restrict heat-trapping gases.
Source: "White House Calls Editing Climate Files Part of Usual Review" by ANDREW C. REVKIN - NY Times - June 9, 2005
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-server 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.
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.
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.
"There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Mr. Bush told reporters in January [2005], 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 televisions news segments, also known as video news releases.
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."
[T]he 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 b the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.
The G.A.O. concluded that [the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of National Drug Control Policy] "designed and executed" their segments "to be indistinguishable from news stories produced by private sector television news organizations." 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.
[O]ne video news release company, TVA Productions, said in a sales pitch to potential clients…that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news releases."
Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be producing more releases, and on a broader array of topics.
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.
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 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 my 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.
Ms Ryan said she was surprised by the number of stations willing to run her government segments without any editing or acknowledgement of their 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."
"They're inherently one-sided, and they don't offer the possibility for follow-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 Stuz, 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 intended 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.
Source: "Under Bush, an New Age of Prepackaged News" by6 David Barstow and Robin Stein - New York Times - 3/13/05
The Bush administration is covertly paying conservative pundits with taxpayer dollars to spread its propaganda in the guise of news.
Armstrong Williams, a prominent conservative commentator who was a protégé of Senator Strom Thurmond and Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, acknowledged yesterday [1/7/05] that he was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to promote its initiatives on his syndicated television program and to other African-Americans in the news media.
[T]he arrangement,…stipulated that a public relations firm hired by the department would "arrange for Mr. Williams to regularly comment on [No Child Left Behind] during the course of his broadcasts," that "Secretary Paige and other department officials shall have the option of appearing from time to time as studio guests," and that "Mr. Williams shall utilize his long-term working relations with 'America's Black Forum'" -- an African-American news program -- "to encourage the producers to periodically address the No Child Left Behind Act."
The disclosure about the arrangement coincides with a decision by the Government Accountability Office that the administration had violated the law against unauthorized federal propaganda by distributing television news segments that promoted drug enforcement policies without identifying their origin. Over 300 news programs reaching over 22 million households broadcast the segments. The accountability office had made a similar ruling in May about the administration's release of news segments promoting its Medicare policies.
Democrats…released a letter to the president suggesting "a deliberate pattern of behavior by your administration to deceive the public and the media in an effort to further your policy objectives" and urging disclosure of "all past and on-going efforts to engage in covert propaganda."
Source: "TV Host Says U.S. Paid Him To Back Policy" by David D. Kirkpatrick - New York Times - 1/8/05
Source: New York Times - 3/13/05