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.)

“Jeff Gannon’s” Secret Life
By Eric Boehlert
Salon

February 15th, 2005

Revelations that the bogus reporter worked as a gay escort are the latest twist in the affair that has the White House squirming — and Democrats demanding explanations.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/15/guckert/print.html

Last week, Republican activist Bobby Eberle, the man behind the now infamous conservative Web site Talon News, insisted that before hiring “Jeff Gannon” as his White House correspondent, he never looked into Gannon’s background. If true, Eberle probably wishes he had. And the same could be said for the White House officials who bent the rules to make way for Gannon in the press briefing room. There’s new evidence that the Talon reporter, who lobbed softball questions at Bush during press conferences on behalf of a dubious news operation, recently worked as a male escort.
Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, made headlines last week when he resigned from Talon after days of intensive scrutiny from bloggers. Online critics first raised questions about Guckert’s questionable journalistic methods and his lack of experience (he often cut and pasted White House press releases into his “news” stories), as well as Talon’s lack of independence from Eberle’s purely partisan GOPUSA Web site. Then questions arose about why the Talon reporter was given access to the White House press room after being turned down for Capitol Hill press credentials. The final straw for Guckert came when bloggers revealed associations that Guckert and his Delaware-based company had with a handful of gay-themed male escort services.

Guckert insisted his only involvement with the sex sites was as a software consultant and, he added: “Those sites were never hosted. There’s — nothing ever went up on them,” as he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Feb. 10. In an interview posted Feb. 11 with Editor & Publisher magazine, Guckert made the same claim: “They were done through a private company [Bedrock Corp.] I was involved with doing Web site development about five years ago. The sites were never hosted, and nothing was ever posted to the sites.” On Monday, John Aravosis posted on his liberal site AmericaBlog.org detailed evidence indicating that not only was Guckert personally involved with the Web sites, but he was also offering his escort services for $200 an hour, or $1,200 a weekend.

Aravosis received on-the-record confirmation, complete with five invoices paid by Delaware’s Bedrock Corp., from the person Guckert hired to build the gay Web site USMCPT.com, which features X-rated photos. The Web designer also forwarded to Aravosis dozens of unused photos that Guckert sent him when the site was being built. “Each photo looks remarkably like Jeff Gannon,” Aravosis writes.

AmericaBlog also details scores of other gay escort sites featuring photos and personal profiles of Guckert, such as MaleCorps.com, WorkingBoys.net, and MeetLocalMen.com. Guckert’s first site remained live until May 8, 2003, one month after he began covering the White House for Talon. According to Aravosis’ research, Guckert’s escort profile on WorkingBoys.net was still active as of Monday. Aravosis says he contacted Guckert for comment for the story but received none. On Sunday night, Guckert had a two-hour phone conversation wtih Michelangelo Signorile, who hosts a talk show on Sirius satellite radio. Although much of the conversation was private, according to Signorile, he asked Guckert specifically, and on the record, about his gay escort past. “I’m just not going to address it,” Guckert said.

Addressing the question of why Guckert’s personal life matters, Aravosis wrote, “This is the Conservative Republican Bush White House we’re talking about. It’s looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a ‘daily basis.’”

Revelations about Guckert’s past certainly do not square with Talon’s openly conservative approach. Talon has defended Bush on the issue of a gay-marriage ban and supported the notion of “ex-gays.” In an article last year, Guckert, as Gannon, wrote that Democratic Sen. John Kerry “might someday be known as ‘the first gay president.’ The Massachusetts liberal has enjoyed a 100 percent rating from the homosexual advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), since 1995 in recognition of his support for the pro-gay agenda.”

Guckert’s brand of openly partisan journalism was often suspect. Last February he reported that a former Kerry intern had taped an interview with “one of the major television networks” to discuss her affair with the senator, an assertion that was completely false. The intern never appeared on television and never claimed to have had an affair with Kerry. (Since quitting, all of Gannon’s stories have been scrubbed from the Talon site.) Describing its editorial mission, Eberle told the Dallas Morning News that if he, as editor, came across a story that was critical of Republicans, “you bet we’d be covering it.” To date, there’s no evidence Talon has come across any such story.

News of Guckert’s past, or at least how he was able to land a coveted White House press pass without submitting himself to a full-scale FBI background check, will likely be addressed at Tuesday’s meeting between leaders of the White House Correspondents Association and White House press secretary Scott McClellan. According to E&P, the two sides are getting together in the wake of the Guckert scandal to discuss ways of adjusting the criteria for White House press passes.

Most White House reporters obtain a permanent, or “hard,” press pass only after passing an FBI background check, and only after first securing Capitol Hill credentials. Guckert was denied Hill credentials when the committee in charge of issuing them could not confirm Talon was a legitimate, independent news organization. Instead, Guckert, with the help of someone inside the White House press office, used a daily pass for nearly two years. Daily passes require only instant background checks, compared to the ones the FBI conducts for hard-pass applicants, which can take several months to complete.

According to Eberle, Guckert provided White House officials with his real name, which means they knew he was writing under a false one. White House officials refuse to discuss why they let Guckert in or what, if any, criteria they used to determine his qualifications. “We’re trying to get more details about how this was done,” says Mark Smith, vice president of the White House Correspondents Association.

Last week, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., requested from McClellan all documents related to Guckert’s press passes. “As you may know, Mr. Guckert/Gannon was denied a Congressional press pass because he could not show that he wrote for a valid news organization. Given the fact that he was denied Congressional credentials, I seek your explanation of how Mr. Guckert/Gannon passed muster for White House press credentials,” Lautenberg wrote. On Monday, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer noted, “This issue is important from an ethical as well as from a national security standpoint. It is hard to understand why a man with little real journalism experience was given a White House press corps credential.”

The gay escort angle may also force Guckert’s conservative defenders to rethink their position. Writing last week for Men’s News Daily, a conservative site often aligned with Talon, columnist Sher Zieve insisted, “My, most reliable, source advises that … before coming to Washington D.C., Jeff was in software. The site domain names were registered, by Jeff, for a client or clients. The same source advises that these sites were never brought on-line, for said clients.”

Writing for the right-wing media advocacy group, Accuracy in Media, Cliff Kincaid dismissed the controversy as “laughable,” insisting Guckert’s only “crimes” were “that he was too pro-Republican, attended White House briefings, and asked questions unfair to Democrats.” And at Power Line, the conservative outpost that wrote relentlessly about CBS’s troubles with its Bush National Guard story last year, the site has confessed bewilderment about the Guckert controversy. “I can’t figure out what the story is,” wrote one of Power Line’s contributors.

Whether news that Guckert was able to go from posting his gay male escort services online to being ushered into the White House under a phony name on behalf of a fake news organization — and was never asked to pass an FBI background check — constitutes a real “story” among the Republican Party faithful, or the mainstream press corps, remains to be seen.

(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.)

TV Host Says U.S. Paid Him to Back Policy
By David D. Kirkpatrick
The New York Times

January 8th, 2005

Armstrong Williams, a prominent conservative commentator who was a protégé of Senator Strom Thurmond and Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court, acknowledged yesterday that he was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to promote its initiatives on his syndicated television program and to other African-Americans in the news media.
The disclosure of the payment set off a storm of criticism from Democrats over the Bush administration’s spending to promote its policies to the public. According to a copy of the contract provided by the department yesterday, Mr. Williams, who also runs a small public relations firm and until yesterday wrote a syndicated newspaper column, was required to broadcast two one-minute advertisements in which Education Secretary Rod Paige extolled the merits of its national standards program, No Child Left Behind.

But the arrangement, which started in late 2003 and was first reported yesterday by USA Today, also stipulated that a public relations firm hired by the department would “arrange for Mr. Williams to regularly comment on N.C.L.B. during the course of his broadcasts,” that “Secretary Paige and other department officials shall have the option of appearing from time to time as studio guests,” and that “Mr. Williams shall utilize his long-term working relationships with ‘America’s Black Forum’ ” - an African-American news program - “to encourage the producers to periodically address the No Child Left Behind Act.”

Mr. Williams, 45, apologized yesterday for blurring his roles as an independent commentator and a paid promoter. “This is a great lesson to me,” he told Paul Begala of CNN, who himself has an off-air job as a paid Democratic political consultant but discloses both roles.

Mr. Williams declined to blame the department for his woes. “I can easily sit here and criticize the administration,” he said. “But I got my own problems today, and that is what I am trying to deal with.”

The disclosure about the arrangement coincides with a decision by the Government Accountability Office that the administration had violated a law against unauthorized federal propaganda by distributing television news segments that promoted drug enforcement policies without identifying their origin. More than 300 news programs reaching more than 22 million households broadcast the segments. The accountability office made a similar ruling in May about news segments promoting Medicare policies, and the Drug Enforcement Agency stopped distributing the segments then.

In a statement, the Department of Education said yesterday that the deal was an appropriate part of its efforts to explain its policy to “minority parents.” The statement said: “The contract paid to provide the straightforward distribution of information about the department’s mission and N.C.L.B. - a permissible use of taxpayer funds.”

John Gibbons, a spokesman for the department, said Mr. Williams was the only broadcaster or journalist paid to promote the policy. Mr. Williams and department officials said the department’s payments to its public relations contractor, Ketchum, ran to $1 million.

House Democrats including the minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and Representative George Miller, senior minority member of the Education and Workforce Committee, both of California, released a letter to the president suggesting “a deliberate pattern of behavior by your administration to deceive the public and the media in an effort to further your policy objectives” and urging disclosure of “all past and ongoing efforts to engage in covert propaganda.”

Questioned about the arrangement, Scott McClellan, a spokesman for the president, referred reporters to the Department of Education.

In an interview, Mr. Miller called the release of the news segments and the payments to Mr. Williams part of “a very dangerous practice that deceives the public” by concealing the role of taxpayer dollars in promoting partisan policies. “Are they funding propaganda?” he asked. “Are they funding money to their friends?”

But public relations executives said that the government distribution of prepared news segments without on-air disclosures of their origin was a bipartisan practice that predated the Bush administration.

“The Clinton administration was probably even more active than the Bush administration” in distributing news segments promoting its policies, said Laurence Moskowitz, chairman and chief executive of Medialink, a major producer of promotional news segments. After the Government Accountability Office decision last spring, he said, his firm began advising government clients to disclose each tape’s nature in its script.

The arrangement with Mr. Williams “is stupid, it is unseemly, and it is tacky,” said Jonah Goldberg, a contributing editor at the conservative National Review.

The National Association of Black Journalists criticized the administration and Mr. Williams alike yesterday, calling on newspapers that use his column and television stations that use his commentary to “drop him immediately.”

“I thought we in the media were supposed to be watchdogs, not lapdogs,” Bryan Monroe, an official of the black journalists’ group and an assistant vice president at Knight Ridder, said in the statement.

In an interview, Mr. Williams said his mistake was thinking like a businessman, without worrying enough about journalistic ethics. He began his career in politics as an aide to Mr. Thurmond of South Carolina. He entered the media business, he said, only after he became known for publicly defending Justice Thomas, his former boss at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, during his stormy confirmation hearings.

After that, he said, he continued to operate a small public relations firm, Graham Williams, with his business partner Stedman Graham, who eventually became known as the partner of Oprah Winfrey and left the business. Aside from the Department of Education, Mr. Williams said, his clients were all private businesses. With about five employees, he said, his company’s revenue runs to about $300,000 a year at most, and last year ended in a loss.

But then he also began writing his newspaper column, syndicated by Tribune Media Services, which dropped him yesterday. He said about 50 papers ran the column. He also began broadcasting a syndicated conservative talk radio show that eventually faded away. And more recently he began a syndicated conservative television show, “The Right Side,” and another series for a fledgling African-American cable channel, TV One.

Mr. Armstrong said his news show ran on cable channels including Dr. Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Television, Sky Angel television, the Christian Television Network and a handful of local stations. Yesterday, Mr. Williams was counting the lessons learned. “I have realized, you know what? I am part of this media elite club, and I have to be more responsible.”

(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 Un-American Sinclair
By John Cory
Truthout

October 20th, 2004

The Sinclair Broadcasting Group is trying to influence a presidential election by airing a scurrilous smear against John Kerry.

It’s that simple.

I don’t really give a damn how they dress it up, it’s about corporate influence and greed, intended to override a public election. They can dress George Bush in a flight suit, but that doesn’t make him a warrior pilot - just the toy soldier of corporate political corruption.
No film is going to change the deadly lie of Vietnam. It was never a “good war,” and forty years later it cannot be re-written into an extension of the glory days of WWII.

Sinclair has taken it upon itself to act as the state-run media and present the party line of its political benefactor, the Bush GOP. Like the former Soviet news agency, or Iraq’s previous state-owned media, Sinclair has pre-determined the issue and the truth for broadcast. And if that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, nothing will.

The American media should be exposing this chicanery, but instead chooses silence. Silence was never an American principle of freedom, and it certainly was not what those of us who served our country fought and died for - at least according to those who sent us.

Sinclair has enshrouded itself with the loathsome Swift Boat Liars, whose fraudulent charges against John Kerry have been debunked by ABC, Media Matters, The Daily Howler, William Rood of the Chicago Tribune, eyewitnesses who served with Kerry, and even the surviving Viet Cong villagers. But Sinclair chooses to serve up more lies and ignore the truth, while spinning and manipulating both the public and these POWs, in order to influence an election for its benefit. Sinclair does not give a rat’s bottom whisker for these men, only for the value of their partisanship to achieve corporate goals.

How despicable can Sinclair Broadcasting be that it would willingly use embittered Vietnam POWs in order to enrich itself with power and GOP glory? How un-American can Sinclair Broadcasting be to slander and smear veterans who dared speak out against dishonesty and imperial hubris?

And make no mistake, Sinclair is not only attacking John Kerry but every veteran returning from Iraq, who dares question or complain about the lies of this administration and the lack of competent leadership and support for our troops and their families.

Sinclair Broadcasting wants to silence dissent, and empower itself as the lone voice of true American values, while buying its way into greater market share.

Vietnam is over. To dishonor the service of veterans who opposed the war is contemptible. To intimidate the next generation of soldiers into silence is against all that America stands for.

Whether you were for or against Vietnam, I encourage every veteran to contact Sinclair Broadcasting and their sponsors, and tell them they are anti-American and they do not own the flag that our brothers served. Ask your Congressional Representative to force the FCC to evaluate Sinclair’s broadcast license to use We the People’s airwaves.

Let us agree to disagree about Vietnam, but never allow the filth and indecency of campaign politics to soil the noble service of veterans, no matter their personal politics.

John Cory is a Vietnam veteran. He received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with V device, 1969 - 1970.

(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.)

Republicans Admit Mailing Campaign Literature Saying Liberals will Ban the Bible
By David D. Kirkpatrick
The New York Times

September 24th, 2004

The Republican Party acknowledged yesterday sending mass mailings to residents of two states warning that “liberals” seek to ban the Bible. It said the mailings were part of its effort to mobilize religious voters for President Bush.

The mailings include images of the Bible labeled “banned” and of a gay marriage proposal labeled “allowed.” A mailing to Arkansas residents warns: “This will be Arkansas if you don’t vote.” A similar mailing was sent to West Virginians.
A liberal religious group, the Interfaith Alliance, circulated a copy of the Arkansas mailing to reporters yesterday to publicize it. “What they are doing is despicable,” said Don Parker, a spokesman for the alliance. “They are playing on people’s fears and emotions.”

In an e-mail message, Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, confirmed that the party had sent the mailings.

“When the Massachusetts Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage and people in other states realized they could be compelled to recognize those laws, same-sex marriage became an issue,” Ms. Iverson said. “These same activist judges also want to remove the words ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance.”

The mailing is the latest evidence of the emphasis Republicans are putting on motivating conservative Christian voters to vote this fall. But as the appeals become public, they also risk alienating moderate and swing voters.

An editorial on Sept. 22 in The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, for example, asked, “Holy Moley! Who concocts this gibberish?”

“Most Americans see morality more complexly,” the editorial said. “Many think a higher morality is found in Christ’s command to help the needy, prevent war and pursue other humanitarian goals. Churchgoers of this sort aren’t likely to believe childish allegations that Democrats want to ban the Bible.”

In statement, Senator John Edwards, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, said President Bush “should condemn the practice immediately and tell everyone associated with the campaign to never use tactics like this again.”

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called the mailings an ugly contrast to Mr. Bush’s public statements. Although the president has called for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, he often emphasizes the need for tolerance as well.

“The president takes more or less the high road and his henchman and allies on the right have been let loose to conduct these ugly, divisive smear campaigns,” Mr. Foreman said. “It is wedge politics at its worst.”

In any event, the Bush campaign appears confident about its religious appeal.

The mailing seeks to appeal to conservative evangelical Protestant pastors and political leaders who say they worry that legal rights for same-sex couples could lead to hate-crimes laws that could be applied against sermons of Bible passages criticizing homosexuality.

Conservative Christian political commentators often cite the case of Ake Green, a minister in Sweden who was jailed in June for a month for a sermon denouncing gays as sinful.

Mr. Parker, of the Interfaith Alliance, said, “I think it is laughable to think that someone could be arrested for reading out loud from the Bible.”

But Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, argued, “We have the First Amendment in this country which should protect churches, but there is no question that this is where some people want to go, that reading from the Bible could be hate speech.”

Still, Mr. Land questioned the assertion that Democrats might ban the whole Bible. “I wouldn’t say it,” he said. “I would think that is probably stretching it a bit far.”

(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.)

Shame on the Swift Boat Veterans For Bush
By Jim Rassmann
The Wall Street Journal

August 10th, 2004

John Kerry saved my life. Now his heroism is being questioned.

I came to know Lt. John Kerry during the spring of 1969. He and his swift boat crew assisted in inserting our Special Forces team and our Chinese Nung soldiers into operational sites in the Cau Mau Peninsula of South Vietnam. I worked with him on many operations and saw firsthand his leadership, courage and decision-making ability under fire.
On March 13, 1969, John Kerry’s courage and leadership saved my life.

While returning from a SEA LORDS operation along the Bay Hap River, a mine detonated under another swift boat. Machine-gun fire erupted from both banks of the river, and a second explosion followed moments later. The second blast blew me off John’s swift boat, PCF-94, throwing me into the river. Fearing that the other boats would run me over, I swam to the bottom of the river and stayed there as long as I could hold my breath.

When I surfaced, all the swift boats had left, and I was alone taking fire from both banks. To avoid the incoming fire, I repeatedly swam under water as long as I could hold my breath, attempting to make it to the north bank of the river. I thought I would die right there. The odds were against me avoiding the incoming fire and, even if I made it out of the river, I thought I’d be captured and executed. Kerry must have seen me in the water and directed his driver, Del Sandusky, to turn the boat around. Kerry’s boat ran up to me in the water, bow on, and I was able to climb up a cargo net to the lip of the deck. But, because I was nearly upside down, I couldn’t make it over the edge of the deck. This left me hanging out in the open, a perfect target. John, already wounded by the explosion that threw me off his boat, came out onto the bow, exposing himself to the fire directed at us from the jungle, and pulled me aboard.

For his actions that day, I recommended John for the Silver Star, our country’s third highest award for bravery under fire. I learned only this past January that the Navy awarded John the Bronze Star with Combat V for his valor. The citation for this award, signed by the Commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam, Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, read, “Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry’s calmness, professionalism and great personal courage under fire were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.” To this day I am grateful to John Kerry for saving my life. And to this day I still believe that he deserved the Silver Star for his courage.

It has been many years since I served in Vietnam. I returned home, got married, and spent many years as a deputy sheriff for Los Angeles County. I retired in 1989 as a lieutenant. It has been a long time since I left Vietnam, but I think often of the men who did not come home with us.

I am neither a politician nor an organizer. I am a retired police officer with a passion for orchids. Until January of this year, the only public presentations I made were about my orchid hobby. But in this presidential election, I had to speak out; I had to tell the American people about John Kerry, about his wisdom and courage, about his vision and leadership. I would trust John Kerry with my life, and I would entrust John Kerry with the well-being of our country.

Nobody asked me to join John’s campaign. Why would they? I am a Republican, and for more than 30 years I have largely voted for Republicans. I volunteered for his campaign because I have seen John Kerry in the worst of conditions. I know his character. I’ve witnessed his bravery and leadership under fire. And I truly know he will be a great commander in chief.

Now, 35 years after the fact, some Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Bush are suddenly lying about John Kerry’s service in Vietnam; they are calling him a traitor because he spoke out against the Nixon administration’s failed policies in Vietnam. Some of these Republican-sponsored veterans are the same ones who spoke out against John at the behest of the Nixon administration in 1971. But this time their attacks are more vicious, their lies cut deep and are directed not just at John Kerry, but at me and each of his crewmates as well. This hate-filled ad asserts that I was not under fire; it questions my words and Navy records. This smear campaign has been launched by people without decency, people who don’t understand the bond of those who serve in combat.

As John McCain noted, the television ad aired by these veterans is “dishonest and dishonorable.” Sen. McCain called on President Bush to condemn the Swift Boat Veterans for Bush ad. Regrettably, the president has ignored Sen. McCain’s advice.

Does this strategy of attacking combat Vietnam veterans sound familiar? In 2000, a similar Republican smear campaign was launched against Sen. McCain. In fact, the very same communications group, Spaeth Communications, that placed ads against John McCain in 2000 is involved in these vicious attacks against John Kerry. Texas Republican donors with close ties to George W. Bush and Karl Rove crafted this “dishonest and dishonorable” ad. Their new charges are false; their stories are fabricated, made up by people who did not serve with Kerry in Vietnam. They insult and defame all of us who served in Vietnam.

But when the noise and fog of their distortions and lies have cleared, a man who volunteered to serve his country, a man who showed up for duty when his country called, a man to whom the United States Navy awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, will stand tall and proud. Ultimately, the American people will judge these Swift Boat Veterans for Bush and their accusations. Americans are tired of smear campaigns against those who volunteered to wear the uniform. Swift Boat Veterans for Bush should hang their heads in shame.

Mr. Rassmann, a retired lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, served with the U.S. Army 5th Special Forces Group in Vietnam 1968-69.

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