NYT: "Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged Television News"

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.

Let me get this straight - the Bush administration is producing "news spots" promoting its programs, advancing its agendas, and hyping its "successes," and television news programs are simply airing the spots as "news" items? I don't know which player in this little farce is more despicable - the politicians who are butchering the First Amendment through deceptive PR spots masquerading as news, or the television stations that are craven enough (or lazy enough) to air these infomercials.

Here's a tip: Any time your government is paying pitchmen to pose as journalists and passing off propaganda as legit news, that's a good time to start being afraid. Such a government is only a few tenuous steps away from the media control of those baddies we all love to hate: North Korea, Iran, China, Cuba, and so on.

95% of Americans get their news (what little they get) by watching TV. How unnerving to think that even the little information about the world at large our neighbors consume might in reality be nothing more than shilling for the President and his cronies?