If you ever watch television news, you may have seen a report by Karen Ryan. She did stories on Medicare and drugs that were played across the country, and she ended every segment by giving the traditional television correspondent's sign-off. "In Washington," she would say, "I'm Karen Ryan, reporting."
But Karen Ryan isn't a reporter; she was a public relations consultant hired by the Bush administration to plug its policies and paid with taxpayer money. What she was doing isn't uncommon: Corporations produce video news releases for distribution to television stations all the time, and the Clinton administration did the same. But the Bush administration's releases, flouting established industry standards, never let viewers know that what they are watching is not a real news story.
Last month, the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, issued a decision saying that what the Bush administration had done was illegal. "Since 1951," the report said, "Congress has enacted an annual, government wide prohibition on the use of appropriated funds for purposes of 'publicity of propaganda.'" It went on to conclude that, because they did not disclose their real source, some of the administration's video news releases had done exactly that.
But the administration last week circulated memos to federal agencies announcing its intention to continue producing the releases. According to The Washington Post, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven G. Bradbury wrote in one of the memos that Bush's legal counsel's office "does not agree with GAO that the covert propaganda prohibition applies simply because an agency's role in producing and disseminating information is undisclosed or 'covert,' regardless of whether the content of the message is 'propaganda.'" Even for this administration, it was a particularly Orwellian moment.
Almost none of the mainstream media touched on the story until The New York Times wrote about it this past Sunday. And why should they? After all, they bear much of the blame for letting these propaganda tools go out to the public unacknowledged and unchallenged. TVA Productions, a company in the business of producing video news releases, has said in sales pitches that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news releases," according to Sunday's Times.
That's what the Bush administration is counting on. In an era of increased media consolidation, an era which this administration and past Republican administrations helped to usher in, the profit margin, and not the news, has become paramount. Reporting budgets have been slashed, and news stories themselves are increasingly under the sway of corporate executives with no journalistic training who are simply looking out for the financial interests of the parent corporations. News organizations have become overstretched and underfunded, unwilling and unable to do the kind of investigative work and hard news reporting that was once their bread and butter.
The void left by the lack of real news reporting, the Bush administration has apparently realized, is a void that can be filled by its propaganda. Witness all of the administration's propaganda efforts that have come to light over the past few months -- conservative columnists paid with taxpayer money to shill for administration initiatives; fake reporter Jeff Gannon given a coveted White House press pass, apparently so he could be around to lob softballs when press conferences got too hard for White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan; and now these releases. The Defense Department has even started its own news channel to further saturate the airwaves with news untarnished by any ugly realities: "We're the 'good news' people," Larry Gilliam, the unit's deputy director, told the Times.
Beyond the legal issues brought up by the administration's action -- and the Defense Department's channel seems to raise further questions about laws against propaganda delivered to residents of the United States -- there are moral issues as well. The Bush administration, since its first inauguration, has sought to rob the media of the ability to properly do its job, and as such it has stolen our ability to distinguish between the facts and the administration's spin.
Thomas Jefferson once said that given the choice between "government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." No democracy can adequately function without a media that tells its constituents the truth, but apparently that's what the Bush administration wants: a populace kept in the dark from the realities of the world, a populace without the information necessary to do its job in questioning the actions of its representatives. It's the media's duty, and our duty, to fight back while we still can.
Alex Koppelman is a senior individualized major in the College from Baltimore and former editor-in-chief of 34th Street Magazine. Rock the Casbah appears on Thursdays.
