The Armstrong Williams NewsHour
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

June 26th, 2005

Here’s the difference between this year’s battle over public broadcasting and the one that blew up in Newt Gingrich’s face a decade ago: this one isn’t really about the survival of public broadcasting. So don’t be distracted by any premature obituaries for Big Bird. Far from being an endangered species, he’s the ornithological equivalent of a red herring.
Let’s not forget that Laura Bush has made a fetish of glomming onto popular “Sesame Street” characters in photo-ops. Polls consistently attest to the popular support for public broadcasting, while Congress is in a race to the bottom with Michael Jackson. Big Bird will once again smite the politicians - as long as he isn’t caught consorting with lesbians.

That doesn’t mean the right’s new assault on public broadcasting is toothless, far from it. But this time the game is far more insidious and ingenious. The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers’ expense. If you liked the fake government news videos that ended up on local stations - or thrilled to the “journalism” of Armstrong Williams and other columnists who were covertly paid to promote administration policies - you’ll love the brave new world this crowd envisions for public TV and radio.

There’s only one obstacle standing in the way of the coup. Like Richard Nixon, another president who tried to subvert public broadcasting in his war to silence critical news media, our current president may be letting hubris get the best of him. His minions are giving any investigative reporters left in Washington a fresh incentive to follow the money.

That money is not the $100 million that the House still threatens to hack out of public broadcasting’s various budgets. Like the theoretical demise of Big Bird, this funding tug-of-war is a smoke screen that deflects attention from the real story. Look instead at the seemingly paltry $14,170 that, as Stephen Labaton of The New York Times reported on June 16, found its way to a mysterious recipient in Indiana named Fred Mann. Mr. Labaton learned that in 2004 Kenneth Tomlinson, the Karl Rove pal who is chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, clandestinely paid this sum to Mr. Mann to monitor his PBS bête noire, Bill Moyers’s “Now.”

Now, why would Mr. Tomlinson pay for information that any half-sentient viewer could track with TiVo? Why would he hire someone in Indiana? Why would he keep this contract a secret from his own board? Why, when a reporter exposed his secret, would he try to cover it up by falsely maintaining in a letter to an inquiring member of the Senate, Byron Dorgan, that another CPB executive had “approved and signed” the Mann contract when he had signed it himself? If there’s a news story that can be likened to the “third-rate burglary,” the canary in the coal mine that invited greater scrutiny of the Nixon administration’s darkest ambitions, this strange little sideshow could be it.

After Mr. Labaton’s first report, Senator Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, called Mr. Tomlinson demanding to see the “product” Mr. Mann had provided for his $14,170 payday. Mr. Tomlinson sent the senator some 50 pages of “raw data.” Sifting through those pages when we spoke by phone last week, Mr. Dorgan said it wasn’t merely Mr. Moyers’s show that was monitored but also the programs of Tavis Smiley and NPR’s Diane Rehm.

Their guests were rated either L for liberal or C for conservative, and “anti-administration” was affixed to any segment raising questions about the Bush presidency. Thus was the conservative Republican Senator Chuck Hagel given the same L as Bill Clinton simply because he expressed doubts about Iraq in a discussion mainly devoted to praising Ronald Reagan. Three of The Washington Post’s star beat reporters (none of whom covers the White House or politics or writes opinion pieces) were similarly singled out simply for doing their job as journalists by asking questions about administration policies.

“It’s pretty scary stuff to judge media, particularly public media, by whether it’s pro or anti the president,” Senator Dorgan said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Not from this gang. Mr. Mann was hardly chosen by chance to assemble what smells like the rough draft of a blacklist. He long worked for a right-wing outfit called the National Journalism Center, whose director, M. Stanton Evans, is writing his own Ann Coulteresque book to ameliorate the reputation of Joe McCarthy. What we don’t know is whether the 50 pages handed over to Senator Dorgan is all there is to it, or how many other “monitors” may be out there compiling potential blacklists or Nixonian enemies lists on the taxpayers’ dime.

We do know that it’s standard practice for this administration to purge and punish dissenters and opponents - whether it’s those in the Pentagon who criticized Donald Rumsfeld’s low troop allotments for Iraq or lobbying firms on K Street that don’t hire Tom DeLay cronies. We also know that Mr. Mann’s highly ideological pedigree is typical of CPB hires during the Tomlinson reign.

Eric Boehlert of Salon discovered that one of the two public ombudsmen Mr. Tomlinson recruited in April to monitor the news broadcasts at PBS and NPR for objectivity, William Schulz, is a former writer for the radio broadcaster Fulton Lewis Jr., a notorious Joe McCarthy loyalist and slime artist. The Times reported that to provide “insights” into Conrad Burns, a Republican senator who supported public-broadcasting legislation that Mr. Tomlinson opposed, $10,000 was shelled out to Brian Darling, the GOP operative who wrote the memo instructing Republicans to milk Terri Schiavo as “a great political issue.”

Then, on Thursday, a Rove dream came true: Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, ascended to the CPB presidency. In her last job, as an assistant secretary of state, Ms. Harrison publicly praised the department’s production of faux-news segments - she called them “good news” segments - promoting American success in Afghanistan and Iraq. As The Times reported in March, one of those fake news videos ended up being broadcast as real news on the Fox affiliate in Memphis.

Mr. Tomlinson has maintained that his goal at CPB is to strengthen public broadcasting by restoring “balance” and stamping out “liberal bias.” But Mr. Moyers left “Now” six months ago. Mr. Tomlinson’s real, not-so-hidden agenda is to enforce a conservative bias or, more specifically, a Bush bias. To this end, he has not only turned CPB into a full-service employment program for apparatchiks but also helped initiate “The Journal Editorial Report,” the only public broadcasting show ever devoted to a single newspaper’s editorial page, that of the zealously pro-Bush Wall Street Journal. Unlike Mr. Moyers’s “Now” - which routinely balanced its host’s liberalism with conservative guests like Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, Paul Gigot and Cal Thomas - The Journal’s program does not include liberals of comparable stature.

THIS is all in keeping with Mr. Tomlinson’s long career as a professional propagandist. During the Reagan administration he ran Voice of America. Then he moved on to edit Reader’s Digest, where, according to Peter Canning’s 1996 history of the magazine, “American Dreamers,” he was rumored to be “a kind of ‘Manchurian Candidate’ ” because of the ensuing spike in pro-CIA spin in Digest articles. Today Mr. Tomlinson is chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the federal body that supervises all nonmilitary international United States propaganda outlets, Voice of America included. That the administration’s foremost propagandist would also be chairman of the board of CPB, the very organization meant to shield public broadcasting from government interference, is astonishing. But perhaps no more so than a White House press secretary month after month turning for softball questions to “Jeff Gannon,” a fake reporter for a fake news organization ultimately unmasked as a GOP activist’s propaganda site.

As the public broadcasting debate plays out, there will be the usual talk about how to wean it from federal subsidy and the usual complaints (which I share) about the redundancy, commerciality and declining quality of some PBS programming in a cable universe. But once Big Bird, like that White House Thanksgiving turkey, is again ritualistically saved from the chopping block and the Senate restores more of the House’s budget cuts, the most crucial test of the damage will be what survives of public broadcasting’s irreplaceable journalistic offerings.

Will monitors start harassing Jim Lehrer’s “NewsHour,” which Mr. Tomlinson trashed at a March 2004 State Department conference as a “tired and slowed down” also-ran to Shepard Smith’s rat-a-tat-tat newscast at Fox News? Will “Frontline” still be taking on the tough investigations that network news no longer touches? Will the reportage on NPR be fearless or the victim of a subtle or not-so-subtle chilling effect instilled by Mr. Tomlinson and his powerful allies in high places?

Forget the pledge drive. What’s most likely to save the independent voice of public broadcasting from these thugs is a rising chorus of Deep Throats.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Tillman Scandal: ‘Newsweek’ Error Bad, Pentagon Lying OK?
By Greg Mitchell
Editor & Publisher

May 24th, 2005

Where, in the week after the Great Newsweek Error, is the comparable outrage in the press, in the blogosphere, and at the White House over the military’s outright lying in the coverup of the death of former NFL star Pat Tillman? Where are the calls for apologies to the public and the firing of those responsible? Who is demanding that the Pentagon’s word should never be trusted unless backed up by numerous named and credible sources?
Where is a Scott McClellan lecture on ethics and credibility?

The Tillman scandal is back in the news thanks not to the military coming clean but because of a newspaper account. Ironically, the newspaper in question, The Washington Post — which has taken the lead on this story since last December — is corporate big brother to Newsweek.

The Post’s Josh White reported this week that Tillman’s parents are now ripping the Army, saying that the military’s investigations into their son’s 2004 “friendly fire” death in Afghanistan was a sham based on “lies” and that the Army cover-up made it harder for them to deal with their loss. They are speaking out now because they have finally had a chance to look at the full records of the military probe.

“Tillman’s mother and father said in interviews that they believe the military and the government created a heroic tale about how their son died to foster a patriotic response across the country,” White reported.

While military officials’ lying to the parents have gained wide publicity in the past two days, hardly anyone has mentioned that they also lied to the public and to the press, which dutifully carried one report after another based on the Pentagon’s spin. It had happened many times before, as in the Jessica Lynch incident.

Tillman was killed in a barrage of gunfire from his own men, mistaken for the enemy on a hillside near the Pakistan border. “Immediately,” the Post reported, “the Army kept the soldiers on the ground quiet and told Tillman’s family and the public that he was killed by enemy fire while storming a hill, barking orders to his fellow Rangers.” Tillman posthumously received the Silver Star for his “actions.”

The latest military investigation, exposed by the Post earlier this month, “showed that soldiers in Afghanistan knew almost immediately that they had killed Tillman by mistake in what they believed was a firefight with enemies on a tight canyon road. The investigation also revealed that soldiers later burned Tillman’s uniform and body armor.”

Patrick Tillman Sr., the father — a lawyer, as it happens — said he blames high-ranking Army officers for presenting “outright lies” to the family and to the public. “After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this,” he told the Post. “They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy.”

“Maybe lying’s not a big deal anymore,” he said. “Pat’s dead, and this isn’t going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has.”

Mary Tillman, the mother, complained to the Post that the government used her son for weeks after his death. She said she was particularly offended when President Bush offered a taped memorial message to Tillman at a Cardinals football game shortly before the presidential election last fall.

Newsweek made a bad mistake in its recent report on Koran abuse at Guantanamo. But it was a mistake, not outright lying. Yet the same critics who blasted the magazine — and the media in general — are not demanding that same contrition or penalties for anyone in the military.

One Newsweek critic after another has asked in the past week that the media come up with just one case where they erred on the side of making the military look good, not bad. One hopes the Tillman example takes care of that request, though there are, of course, many others.

It is worth looking back at how Steve Coll of the Washington Post last December described the early weeks of the Pentagon spin on Tillman:

“Just days after Pat Tillman died from friendly fire on a desolate ridge in southeastern Afghanistan,” Coll wrote, “the U.S. Army Special Operations Command released a brief account of his last moments.

“The April 30, 2004, statement awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for combat valor and described how a section of his Ranger platoon came under attack.

“‘He ordered his team to dismount and then maneuvered the Rangers up a hill near the enemy’s location,’ the release said. ‘As they crested the hill, Tillman directed his team into firing positions and personally provided suppressive fire. … Tillman’s voice was heard issuing commands to take the fight to the enemy forces.’

“It was a stirring tale and fitting eulogy for the Army’s most famous volunteer in the war on terrorism, a charismatic former pro football star whose reticence, courage and handsome beret-draped face captured for many Americans the best aspects of the country’s post-Sept. 11 character.

“It was also a distorted and incomplete narrative, according to dozens of internal Army documents obtained by The Washington Post that describe Tillman’s death by fratricide after a chain of botched communications, a misguided order to divide his platoon over the objection of its leader and undisciplined firing by fellow Rangers.

“The Army’s public release made no mention of friendly fire, even though at the time it was issued, investigators in Afghanistan had already taken at least 14 sworn statements from Tillman’s platoon members that made clear the true causes of his death.

“But the Army’s published account not only withheld all evidence of fratricide, but also exaggerated Tillman’s role and stripped his actions of their context. … The Army’s April 30 news release was just one episode in a broader Army effort to manage the uncomfortable facts of Pat Tillman’s death, according to internal records and interviews.”

Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is the editor of E&P and the author of seven books on history and politics.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

White House Curbs Probe of Commentator’s Hiring
By Tom Hamburger
The Los Angeles Times

April 15th, 2005

Some administration staffers were not allowed to be interviewed by investigators looking into Armstrong Williams’ paid role.

Washington - Education Department investigators looking into the administration’s controversial hiring of commentator Armstrong Williams were denied the opportunity to interview some White House personnel because of a White House claim that such interviews could breach long-standing legal traditions.
“By statute, an inspector general’s jurisdiction is limited,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Thursday. “An IG can request information from other federal agencies but not from the White House office.”

She said the White House did allow the investigators to interview one White House employee who had been on loan to the Education Department when Williams was hired. But it has not granted permission for other interviews.

The White House refusal came to light Thursday after Rep. George Miller (D-CA) said he was told about it by Inspector General Jack Higgins. Miller wrote to the White House asking that investigators have full access to White House personnel so they could get to the bottom of the hiring of Williams.

Williams, a television and newspaper commentator, received $240,000 in federal funds last year to promote the president’s No Child Left Behind initiative. Williams did not disclose the payments made to him through a public relations firm hired by the Education Department, even as he appeared on television promoting the president’s work.

After disclosure of Williams’ contract in January, Higgins launched an inquiry that is nearly complete.

This week, Higgins and members of his staff briefed Miller and informed him that they had encountered two potential obstacles, Miller said in an interview.

The first was the White House refusal to allow investigators to interview all officials who may have had knowledge of the Williams contract. Second was that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was considering deleting part of a draft copy of the inspector general’s report, which has not been released.

Asked about the assertion that Spellings intended to invoke a “deliberative process privilege” that would require Higgins to delete information from the report, Spellings’ office issued a statement late Thursday saying she would release the inspector general’s draft unedited.

“The inspector general will be releasing it as originally drafted with the secretary’s full and complete support and cooperation,” said department spokeswoman Susan Aspey.

Earlier in the day, Miller rejected the notion that the law should prevent White House staffers from cooperating. “The public’s right to know is absolutely more important than any claim of privilege that the White House or the Department of Education might make,” Miller said.

Perino said it was a matter of principle. She said permission was granted to interview a White House official about his time spent at the Education Department, but not to question officials who worked at the White House at the time Williams was hired and who have since moved to the Education Department.

That could include Spellings, who was the top domestic policy advisor at the White House during President Bush’s first term and was named Education secretary Nov. 17.

“The courts have ruled in many contexts that the White House office is not a federal agency,” Perino said. “A similar principle underlies the long-standing tradition of White House staff not testifying before Congress. We are declining as a matter of policy.”

Higgins did not respond to a request for comment.

Constitutional law scholars said that the case law in this area was thin but that the White House could, at its discretion, permit current or former staff to be interviewed by the inspector general.

“At first blush, this strikes me as not in the zone of the law but in the zone of politics,” said Goodwin Liu, a constitutional law expert at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

An aide to Miller said the White House explanation “unmistakably leads you back to the question, ‘Is there something the White House is trying to cover up or hide?’”

Miller asked Higgins to delay release of the report until the White House granted “Higgins’ office the right to interview any current or former White House officials with information about the contract.”

USA Today first disclosed the Williams contract in January. At the time, Democrats charged that taxpayer funds were being used to distribute Republican propaganda. The White House has consistently distanced itself from the decision to hire Williams, and Bush has criticized the decision. He did so again Thursday when he told a meeting of newspaper editors that the hiring of Williams “was wrong.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Enron: Patron Saint of Bush’s Fake News
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

March 20th, 2005

Just when Americans are being told it’s safe to hand over their savings to Wall Street again, he’s baaaack! Looking not unlike Chucky, the demented doll of perennial B-horror-movie renown, Ken Lay has crawled out of Houston’s shadows for a media curtain call.

His trial is still months away, but there he was last Sunday on “60 Minutes,” saying he knew nothin’ ’bout nothin’ that went down at Enron. This week he is heading toward the best-seller list, as an involuntary star of “Conspiracy of Fools,” the New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald’s epic account of the multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme anointed America’s “most innovative company” (six years in a row by Fortune magazine). Coming soon, the feature film: Alex Gibney’s “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” a documentary seen at Sundance, goes into national release next month. As long as you’re not among those whose 401(k)’s and pensions were wiped out, it’s morbidly entertaining. In one surreal high point, Mr. Lay likens investigations of Enron to terrorist attacks on America. For farce, there’s the sight of a beaming Alan Greenspan as he accepts the “Enron Award for Distinguished Public Service” only days after Enron has confessed to filing five years of bogus financial reports. Then again, given the implicit quid pro quo in this smarmy tableau, maybe that’s the Enron drama’s answer to a sex scene.
The Bush administration, eager to sell the country on “personal” Social Security accounts, cannot be all that pleased to see Kenny Boy again. He’s the poster boy for how big guys can rip off suckers in the stock market. He also dredges up some inconvenient pre-9/11 memories of Bush family business. Enron was the biggest Bush-Cheney campaign contributor in the 2000 election. Kenny Boy and his lovely wife Linda flew the first President Bush and Barbara Bush to the ensuing Inauguration on the Enron jet. Even as Enron was presiding over rolling blackouts in California, Dick Cheney or his aides had at least six meetings with the company’s executives to carve up government energy policy in 2001. Even now what exactly transpired at those meetings remains a secret.

But never mind. The president himself gave his word when the Enron scandal broke that Kenny Boy was really more of a supporter of Ann Richards anyway. Feeling our pain, Mr. Bush told us of his own personal tragedy: his mother-in-law lost $8,000 she had invested in Enron. Soon stuff was happening in Iraq, and the case was closed, or at least forgotten.

Yet the larger shadows linger. Revisiting the Enron story as it re-emerges in 2005 is to be reminded of just how much the Enron culture has continued to shape the Bush administration long after the company itself imploded and the Lays were eighty-sixed from the White House Christmas card list.

The enduring legacy of Enron can be summed up in one word: propaganda. Here was a corporate house of cards whose business few could explain and whose source of profits was an utter mystery - and yet it thrived, unquestioned, for years. How? As the narrator says in “The Smartest Guys in the Room,” Enron “was fixated on its public relations campaigns.” It churned out slick PR videos as if it were a Hollywood studio. It browbeat the press (until a young Fortune reporter, Bethany McLean, asked one question too many). In a typical ruse in 1998, a gaggle of employees was rushed onto an empty trading floor at the company’s Houston headquarters to put on a fictional show of busy trading for visiting Wall Street analysts being escorted by Mr. Lay. “We brought some of our personal stuff, like pictures, to make it look like the area was lived in,” a laid-off Enron employee told The Wall Street Journal in 2002. “We had to make believe we were on the phone buying and selling” even though “some of the computers didn’t even work.”

If this Potemkin village sounds familiar, take a look at the ongoing 60-stop “presidential roadshow” in which Mr. Bush has “conversations on Social Security” with “ordinary citizens” for the consumption of local and national newscasts. As in the president’s “town meeting” campaign appearances last year, the audiences are stacked with prescreened fans; any dissenters who somehow get in are quickly hustled away by security goons. But as The Washington Post reported last weekend, the preparations are even more elaborate than the finished product suggests; the seeming reality of the event is tweaked as elaborately as that of a television reality show. Not only are the panelists for these conversations recruited from administration supporters, but they are rehearsed the night before, with a White House official playing Mr. Bush. One participant told The Post, “We ran through it five times before the president got there.” Finalists who vary just slightly from the administration’s pitch are banished from the cast at the last minute, “American Idol”-style.

Like Enron’s stockholders, American taxpayers pay for the production of such propaganda, even if its message, like that of the Enron show put on for visiting analysts, misrepresents and distorts the bottom line of the scheme that is being sold. We paid for last year’s phony television news reports in which the faux reporter Karen Ryan “interviewed” administration officials who gave partially deceptive information hyping the Medicare prescription-drug program. We paid Armstrong Williams his $240,000 for delivering faux-journalistic analysis of the No Child Left Behind act.

The administration cycled the Ryan and Williams paychecks through the PR giant Ketchum Communications. Ketchum was also one of the companies hired to flack for Andersen, the now-defunct Enron accounting firm that shredded a ton of documents. We don’t know what, if any, role Ketchum is playing in the White House’s Social Security propaganda push, though we do know the company has received at least $97 million from the government, according to a Congressional report.

That $97 million may yet prove a mere down payment. The Times reported last weekend that the administration told executive-branch agencies simply to ignore a stern directive by the Congressional Government Accountability Office discouraging the use of “covert propaganda” like the Karen Ryan “news reports.” In other words, the brakes are off, and before long, the government could have a larger budget for fake news than actual television news divisions have for real news. At last weekend’s Gridiron dinner, Mr. Bush made a joke about how “most” of his good press on Social Security came from Armstrong Williams, and the Washington press corps yukked it up. The joke, however, is on them - and us.

USA Today reported this month that the Department of Homeland Security, having failed miserably to secure American ports and air transportation from potential Al Qaeda attacks, has nonetheless shelled out $100,000-plus to hire “a Hollywood liaison”: Bobbie Faye Ferguson, an actress whose credits include the movie “The Bermuda Triangle” and guest shots on television schlock like “Designing Women” and “The Dukes of Hazzard.” She will “work with moviemakers and scriptwriters” to give us homeland security infotainment - which is to actual homeland security what the movie “Independence Day” is to an actual terrorist attack.

Another propagandist with a rising profile is Susan Molinari, the onetime CBS News personality who appears regularly on news shows like “Hardball” and “Capitol Report.” As she bloviates from the right about Social Security or the fake newsman Jeff Gannon, she is invariably described as “a former Republican Congresswoman” or a “CNBC political analyst.” But her actual current jobs remain mysteriously unmentioned: C.E.O. of the Washington Group, Ketchum’s lobbying firm, and president of Ketchum Public Affairs. Were the Ketchum link disclosed, perhaps some real NBC reporter might find the nerve to ask her what other Karen Ryans and Armstrong Williamses might be on the Ketchum payroll. Or not.

The Bush propagandists have been successful at many tasks, from fomenting the canard that Iraqis attacked on 9/11 to deflecting moral outrage from Abu Ghraib and toward indecency as defined by its Federal Communications Commission. But Social Security may be a bridge too far even for propaganda machinery of this heft. Polls find that an ever-increasing majority of the country rejects the idea of letting Wall Street get its hands on its retirement savings.

Americans do have short memories, but it’s the administration’s bad luck that not just Kenny Boy but a whole brigade of bubble plutocrats have lately been yanked back into the spotlight by their legal travails: WorldCom’s Bernard J. Ebbers, Tyco’s L. Dennis Kozlowski, HealthSouth’s Richard M. Scrushy, Global Crossing’s Gary Winnick. No one is glad to see them. The public knows that the economy has not fully mended, and that there remain different economic rules for insiders than for the panelists drafted for the presidential Social Security roadshow. The new bankruptcy bill embraced this month by Republicans and Democrats alike throws Americans paying usurious credit-card interest to the wolves even as wealthy debtors remain protected.

You can catch the public mood in the reaction to Martha Stewart’s homecoming. Despite the news media’s heavy-breathing efforts to hype her emergence from jail as the heartwarming comeback of a born-again humanitarian, the bottom line shows that few in the audience are buying it. The Martha Stewart Omnimedia stock price started tumbling the moment she was back on camera, in line with the cratered circulation and ad sales of her magazine. Handing out hot cocoa to reporters at her Bedford, N.Y., estate did not turn the tide, and her spinoff of “The Apprentice” may be arriving just as the country is getting sick of C.E.O.’s again. Coincidentally or not, ratings for the existing “Apprentice” are off in tandem with the filing for bankruptcy protection by Donald Trump’s casino empire, the saturation coverage of his lavish nuptials and the introduction of a Trump fragrance.

It’s against this backdrop that the returning Mr. Lay - completely unrepentant, still purporting on “60 Minutes” that he’s an innocent victim of others - could be the Democrats’ new best friend. A Texas tycoon who helped create the political career of George W. Bush only to be discarded when scandal struck has re-emerged at just the precise moment when he might do his old buddy the most harm.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Under Bush, A New Age of Prepackaged Television News
By David Barstow and Robin Stein
The New York Times

March 13th, 2005

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.”

CONTINUED IN PART TWO….

Under Bush, A New Age of Prepackaged Television News
By David Barstow and Robin Stein
The New York Times

CONTINUED FROM PART ONE

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.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

All The President’s Newsmen
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

January 13th, 2005

One day after the co-host Tucker Carlson made his farewell appearance and two days after the new president of CNN made the admirable announcement that he would soon kill the program altogether, a television news miracle occurred: even as it staggered through its last nine yards to the network guillotine, “Crossfire” came up with the worst show in its fabled 23-year history.
This was a half-hour of television so egregious that it makes Jon Stewart’s famous pre-election rant seem, if anything, too kind. This time “Crossfire” wasn’t just “hurting America,” as Mr. Stewart put it, by turning news into a nonsensical gong show. It was unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly, complicit in the cover-up of a scandal.

I do not mean to minimize the CBS News debacle and other recent journalistic outrages at The New York Times and elsewhere. But the Jan. 7 edition of CNN’s signature show can stand as an exceptionally ripe paradigm of what is happening to the free flow of information in a country in which a timid news media, the fierce (and often covert) Bush administration propaganda machine, lax and sometimes corrupt journalistic practices, and a celebrity culture all combine to keep the public at many more than six degrees of separation from anything that might resemble the truth.

On this particular “Crossfire,” the featured guest was Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist (for papers like The Washington Times and The Detroit Free Press, among many others, according to his Web site). Thanks to investigative reporting by USA Today, he had just been unmasked as the frontman for a scheme in which $240,000 of taxpayers’ money was quietly siphoned to him through the Department of Education and a private p.r. firm so that he would “regularly comment” upon (translation: shill for) the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind policy in various media venues during an election year. Given that “Crossfire” was initially conceived as a program for tough interrogation and debate, you’d think that the co-hosts still on duty after Mr. Carlson’s departure might try to get some answers about this scandal, whose full contours, I suspect, we are only just beginning to discern.

But there is nothing if not honor among bloviators. “On the left,” as they say at “Crossfire,” Paul Begala, a Democratic political consultant, offered condemnations of the Bush administration but had only soft questions and plaudits for Mr. Williams. Three times in scarcely as many minutes Mr. Begala congratulated his guest for being “a stand-up guy” simply for appearing in the show’s purportedly hostile but entirely friendly confines. When Mr. Williams apologized for having crossed “some ethical lines,” that was enough to earn Mr. Begala’s benediction: “God bless you for that.”

“On the right” was the columnist Robert Novak, who “in the interests of full disclosure” told the audience he is a “personal friend” of Mr. Williams, whom he “greatly” admires as “one of the foremost voices for conservatism in America.” Needless to say, Mr. Novak didn’t have any tough questions, either, but we should pause a moment to analyze this “Crossfire” co-host’s disingenuous use of the term “full disclosure.”

Last year Mr. Novak had failed to fully disclose - until others in the press called him on it - that his son is the director of marketing for Regnery, the company that published “Unfit for Command,” the Swift boat veterans’ anti-Kerry screed that Mr. Novak flogged relentlessly on CNN and elsewhere throughout the campaign. Nor had he fully disclosed, as Mary Jacoby of Salon reported, that Regnery’s owner also publishes his subscription newsletter ($297 a year). Nor has Mr. Novak fully disclosed why he has so far eluded any censure in the federal investigation of his outing of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Plame, while two other reporters, Judith Miller of The Times and Matt Cooper of Time, are facing possible prison terms in the same case. In this context, Mr. Novak’s “full disclosure” of his friendship with Mr. Williams is so anomalous that it raised many more questions than it answers.

That he and Mr. Begala would be allowed to lob softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing, on a show produced by television’s self-proclaimed “most trusted” news network, is bad enough. That almost no one would notice, let alone protest, is a snapshot of our cultural moment, in which hidden agendas in the presentation of “news” metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism. But the ugly bigger picture reaches well beyond “Crossfire” and CNN.

Mr. Williams has repeatedly said in his damage-control press appearances that he was being paid the $240,000 only to promote No Child Left Behind. He also routinely says that he made the mistake of taking the payola because he wasn’t part of the “media elite” and therefore didn’t know “the rules and guidelines” of journalistic conflict-of-interest. His own public record tells us another story entirely. While on the administration payroll he was not only a cheerleader for No Child Left Behind but also for President Bush’s Iraq policy and his performance in the presidential debates. And for a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.

He took to CNN last October to give his own critique of the CBS News scandal, pointing out that the producer of the Bush-National Guard story, Mary Mapes, was guilty of a conflict of interest because she introduced her source, the anti-Bush partisan Bill Burkett, to a Kerry campaign operative, Joe Lockhart. In this Mr. Williams’s judgment was correct, but grave as Ms. Mapes’s infraction was, it isn’t quite in the same league as receiving $240,000 from the United States Treasury to propagandize for the Bush campaign on camera. Mr. Williams also appeared with Alan Murray on CNBC to trash Kitty Kelley’s book on the Bush family, on CNN to accuse the media of being Michael Moore’s “p.r. machine” and on Tina Brown’s CNBC talk show to lambaste Mr. Stewart for doing a “puff interview” with John Kerry on “The Daily Show” (which Mr. Williams, unsurprisingly, seems to think is a real, not a fake, news program).

But perhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all “journalists,” was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced “cheap shot journalism” in which “the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective.”

This is a scenario out of “The Manchurian Candidate.” Here we find Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” recitation of American casualties in Iraq and then propose showing an anti-Kerry documentary, “Stolen Honor,” under the rubric of “news” in prime time just before Election Day. (After fierce criticism, Sinclair retreated from that plan.) Thus the Williams interview with the vice president, implicitly presented as an example of the kind of “objective” news Mr. Cheney endorses, was in reality a completely subjective, bought-and-paid-for fake news event for a broadcast company that barely bothers to fake objectivity and both of whose chief executives were major contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. The Soviets couldn’t have constructed a more ingenious or insidious plot to bamboozle the citizenry.

Ever since Mr. Williams was exposed by USA Today, he has been stonewalling all questions about what the Bush administration knew of his activities and when it knew it. In his account, he was merely a lowly “subcontractor” of the education department. “Never was the White House ever mentioned anytime during this,” he told NBC’s Campbell Brown, as if that were enough to deflect Ms. Brown’s observation that “the Department of Education works for the White House.” For its part, the White House is saying that the whole affair is, in the words of the press secretary, Scott McClellan, “a contracting matter” and “a decision by the Department of Education.” In other words, the buck stops (or started) with Rod Paige, the elusive outgoing education secretary who often appeared with Mr. Williams in his pay-for-play propaganda.

But we now know that there have been at least three other cases in which federal agencies have succeeded in placing fake news reports on television during the Bush presidency. The Department of Health and Human Services, the Census Bureau and the Office of National Drug Control Policy have all sent out news “reports” in which, to take one example, fake newsmen purport to be “reporting” why the administration’s Medicare prescription-drug policy is the best thing to come our way since the Salk vaccine. So far two Government Accountability Office investigations have found that these Orwellian stunts violated federal law that prohibits “covert propaganda” purchased with taxpayers’ money. But the Williams case is the first one in which a well-known talking head has been recruited as the public face for the fake news instead of bogus correspondents (recruited from p.r. companies) with generic eyewitness-news team names like Karen Ryan and Mike Morris.

Or is Mr. Williams merely the first one of his ilk to be exposed? Every time this administration puts out fiction through the news media - the “Rambo” exploits of Jessica Lynch, the initial cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire - it’s assumed that a credulous and excessively deferential press was duped. But might there be more paid agents at loose in the media machine? In response to questions at the White House, Mr. McClellan has said that he is “not aware” of any other such case and that he hasn’t “heard” whether the administration’s senior staff knew of the Williams contract - nondenial denials with miles of wiggle room. Mr. Williams, meanwhile, has told both James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times and David Corn of The Nation that he has “no doubt” that there are “others” like him being paid for purveying administration propaganda and that “this happens all the time.” So far he is refusing to name names - a vow of omertà all too reminiscent of that taken by the low-level operatives first apprehended in that “third-rate burglary” during the Nixon administration.

If CNN, just under new management, wants to make amends for the sins of “Crossfire,” it might dispatch some real reporters to find out just which “others” Mr. Williams is talking about and to follow his money all the way back to its source.

© 2005 The New York Times Company

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

When Real News Debunks Fake News
By Frank Rich
The International Herald Tribune

February 19th, 2005

New York - The prayers of those hoping that real television news might take its cues from Jon Stewart were finally answered on Feb. 9, 2005. A real newsman borrowed a technique from fake news to deliver real news about fake news in prime time.
Let me explain.

On “Countdown,” a nightly news hour on MSNBC, the anchor, Keith Olbermann, led off with a bit in the classic style of Stewart’s classic “Daily Show”: a rapid-fire montage of sharply edited video bites illustrating the apparent idiocy of those in Washington. In this case, the eight clips stretched over a year in the White House briefing room - from February 2004 to late last month - and all featured a reporter named “Jeff.” In most of them, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, says “Go ahead, Jeff,” and “Jeff” responds with a softball question intended not to elicit information but to boost President George W. Bush and smear his political opponents. In the last clip, “Jeff” is quizzing the president himself, in his first post-inaugural press conference of Jan. 26. Referring to Harry Reid and Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Jeff” asks, “How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

If we did not live in a time when the news culture itself is divorced from reality, the story might end there: “Jeff,” you’d assume, was a lapdog reporter from a legitimate, if right-wing, news organization like Fox, and you’d get some predictable yuks from watching a compressed video anthology of his kissing up to power. But as Olbermann explained, “Jeff Gannon,” the star of the montage, was a newsman no more real than a “Senior White House Correspondent” like Stephen Colbert on “The Daily Show.” Yet the video broadcast by Olbermann was not fake. “Jeff” was in the real White House, and he did have those exchanges with the real McClellan and the real Bush.

“Jeff Gannon’s” real name is James Guckert. His employer was a Web site called Talon News, staffed mostly by volunteer Republican activists. Media Matters for America, the liberal press monitor that has done the most exhaustive research into the case, discovered that Talon’s “news” often consists of recycled Republican National Committee and White House press releases, and its content frequently overlaps with another partisan site, GOPUSA, with which it shares its owner, a Texas delegate to the 2000 Republican convention. Nonetheless, for nearly two years the White House press office had credentialed Guckert, even though, as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post explained on Olbermann’s show, he “was representing a phony media company that doesn’t really have any such thing as circulation or readership.”

How this happened is a mystery that has yet to be solved. “Jeff” has now quit Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but because of other embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to sites like hotmilitarystud9.com and to an apparently promising career as an X-rated $200-per-hour “escort.” But it shouldn’t distract from the real question - that is, the real news - of how this fake newsman might be connected to a White House propaganda machine that grows curiouser by the day. Though McClellan told Editor & Publisher magazine that he didn’t know until recently that Guckert was using an alias, Bruce Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko that “if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover.” (Otherwise, it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security breach.)

By my count, “Jeff Gannon” is now at least the sixth “journalist”to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration’s “marriage” initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports pretending to “sort through the details” of the administration’s Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such “reports,” some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal “covert propaganda” by the Government Accountability Office.

The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration’s total $250 million PR kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.

Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is only a small piece of the administration’s overall propaganda effort. Bush wasn’t entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion “scripted” while it was still going on. Everything is scripted.

There were the pre-fab “Ask President Bush” town hall-style meetings during last year’s campaign. A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut down in 2002 when it became a political liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish Network.

It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn’t using taxpayers’ money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government.

Conservatives, who supposedly deplore postmodernism, are now welcoming in a brave new world in which it’s a given that there can be no empirical reality in news, only the reality you want to hear (or they want you to hear). For a case in point, you needed only switch to CNN on the day after Olbermann did his fake-news-style story on the fake reporter in the White House press corps.

“Jeff Gannon” had decided to give an exclusive TV interview to a sober practitioner of real news, Wolf Blitzer. Given this journalistic opportunity, the anchor asked questions almost as soft as those “Jeff” himself had asked in the White House. Blitzer didn’t question Guckert’s outrageous assertion that he adopted a fake name because “Jeff Gannon is easier to pronounce and easier to remember.” (Is “Jeff” easier to pronounce than his real first name, Jim?) Blitzer never questioned Gannon/Guckert’s assertion that Talon News “is a separate, independent news division” of GOPUSA.

The “real” news from CNN was no news at all, but it’s not as if any of its competitors did much better. The “Jeff Gannon” story got less attention than another media frenzy - that set off by the veteran news executive Eason Jordan, who resigned from CNN after speaking recklessly at a panel discussion at Davos, where he apparently implied, at least in passing, that American troops deliberately targeted reporters. Is the banishment of a real newsman for behaving foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a more pressing story than that of a fake newsman gaining years of access to the White House (and network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances? As Olbermann demonstrated when he borrowed a sharp “Daily Show” tool to puncture the “Jeff Gannon” case, the only road back to reality may be to fight fake with fake.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Administration Is Warned About Its ‘News’ Videos
By Anne E. Kornblut
The New York Times

February 19th, 2005

The comptroller general has issued a blanket warning that reminds federal agencies they may not produce newscasts promoting administration policies without clearly stating that the government itself is the source.
Twice in the last two years, agencies of the federal government have been caught distributing prepackaged television programs that used paid spokesmen acting as newscasters and, in violation of federal law, failed to disclose the administration’s role in developing and financing them.

And those were not isolated incidents, David M. Walker, the comptroller general, said in a letter dated Thursday that put all agency heads on notice about the practice.

In fact, it has become increasingly common for federal agencies to adopt the public relations tactic of producing “video news releases” that look indistinguishable from authentic newscasts and, as ready-made and cost-free reports, are sometimes picked up by local news programs. It is illegal for the government to produce or distribute such publicity material domestically without disclosing its own role.

Mr. Walker, who as comptroller general is chief of the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, said in his letter: “While agencies generally have the right to disseminate information about their policies and activities, agencies may not use appropriated funds to produce or distribute prepackaged news stories intended to be viewed by television audiences that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials.”

“It is not enough,” he added, “that the contents of an agency’s communication may be unobjectionable.”

Mr. Walker’s letter was made available late Friday afternoon by Democrats on Capitol Hill. Asked for a response Friday night, the White House had no immediate comment.

The two best-known cases of such video news releases - one concerning the new Medicare law, the other an antidrug campaign by the Bush administration - drew sharp rebukes from the G.A.O. after separate investigations last year found that the agencies involved had violated the law.

Those cases were followed by disclosures that the government had paid at least one conservative commentator, Armstrong Williams, to promote the administration’s No Child Left Behind education measure and had put two other conservative writers on the federal payroll to help develop programs. These episodes have prompted calls from Democrats for stricter oversight of the administration’s publicity practices, which have cost millions of dollars of federal revenue.

In the Medicare case, a video made in the style of a newscast featured a spokeswoman named Karen Ryan who claimed to be reporting from Washington on Medicare law changes strongly backed by the administration but opposed by many Democrats, who consider them a windfall for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. In part of one script, she said that “all people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending.”

Often there is an intermediary in the process: a public relations firm hired by a government agency to produce a polished video and direct other aspects of a publicity drive.

One centrally involved firm is Ketchum, a giant in the public relations industry whose representatives arranged for both the Medicare video and the contract with Mr. Williams, a pact that is now under investigation by three government agencies. Ketchum has received $97 million in government public relations contracts since 2001.

The G.A.O. letter did not caution agencies to curtail their publicity practices, telling them simply to adhere to disclosure requirements.

“Prepackaged news stories,” Mr. Walker wrote, “can be utilized without violating the law, so long as there is clear disclosure to the television viewing audience that this material was prepared by or in cooperation with the government department or agency.”

But Democrats said they hoped the letter would lead to tougher scrutiny of what they describe as an aggressive publicity machine within the administration.

“The G.A.O. is sending a clear message to the Bush administration: shut down the propaganda mill,” Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey said in a statement on Friday. “The G.A.O. is simply telling the White House to stop manipulating media, stop paying journalists and be straight with the American people.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

A Hireling, A Fraud And A Prostitute
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian

February 17th, 2005

Bush’s agent in the press corps has given spin a new level of meaning

The White House press room has often been a cockpit of intrigue, duplicity and truckling. But nothing challenges the most recent scandal there.
The latest incident began with a sequence of questions for President Bush at his January 26 press conference. First, he was asked whether he approved of his administration’s payments to conservative commentators. Government contracts had been granted to three pundits, who had tried to keep the funding secret. “There needs to be a nice, independent relationship between the White House and the press,” said the president as he called swiftly on his next questioner.

Jeff Gannon, Washington bureau chief of Talon News, rose from his chair to attack Democrats in the Congress. “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?”

For almost two years, in the daily White House press briefings Gannon had been called upon by press secretary Scott McClellan to break up difficult questioning from the rest of the press. On Fox News, one host hailed him as “a terrific Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent”. Gannon was frequently quoted and highlighted as an expert guest on rightwing radio shows. But who was Gannon? His strange non-question to the president inspired inquiry. Talon News is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a group of Texas Republicans. Gannon’s most notable article had asserted that John Kerry “might some day be known as ‘the first gay President’”.

Gannon also got himself entangled in the investigation into the criminal disclosure of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame. Plame is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the Bush administration to discover whether Saddam Hussein was procuring uranium in Niger for nuclear weapons. He learned that the suspicion was bogus; appalled that the administration lied about nuclear WMD to justify the Iraq war, he wrote an article in the New York Times about his role after the war.

In retaliation, Plame’s CIA cover was blown by administration officials. Gannon had called up Wilson to ask him about a secret CIA memo supposedly proving that his wife had sent him on the original mission to Niger, prompting the special prosecutor in the case to question Gannon about his “sources”.

His real name, it turned out, is James Dale Guckert. He has no journalistic background whatsoever. His application for a press credential to cover the Congress was rejected. But at the White House the press office arranged for him to be given a new pass every single day, a deliberate evasion of the regular credentialing that requires an FBI security check. It was soon revealed. “Gannon” owned and advertised his services as a gay escort on more than half a dozen websites with names like Militarystud.com, MaleCorps.com, WorkingBoys.net and MeetLocalMen.com, which featured dozens of photographs of “Gannon” in dramatic naked poses. One of the sites was still active this week.

Thus a phony journalist, planted by a Republican organisation, used by the White House press secretary to interrupt questions from the press corps, protected from FBI vetting by the press office, disseminating smears about its critics and opponents, some of them gay-baiting, was unmasked not only as a hireling and fraud but as a gay prostitute, with enormous potential for blackmail.

The Bush White House is the most opaque - allowing the least access for reporters - in living memory. Every news organisation has been intimidated, and reporters who have done stories the administration finds discomfiting have received threats about their careers. The administration has its own quasi-official state TV network in Fox News; hundreds of rightwing radio shows, conservative newspapers and journals and internet sites coordinate with the Republican apparatus.

Inserting an agent directly into the White House press corps was a daring operation. Until his exposure, he proved useful for the White House. But the longer-term implication is the Republican effort to sideline an independent press and undermine its legitimacy. “Spin” seems quaint. “In this day and age,” said press secretary McClellan, waxing philosophical about the Gannon affair, “when you have a changing media, it’s not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and choose who is a journalist.” It is not that the White House press secretary cannot distinguish who is or is not a journalist; it is that there are no journalists, just the gaming of the system for the concentration of power.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)