messing with the public mind

[Dan Scanlan <coolhanduke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/prop-m17.shtml

Bush administration defends use of covert propaganda in US

By Bill Van Auken
 17 March 2005


The Bush administration last week instructed US government agencies to 
ignore a ruling by the comptroller general of the United States barring 
the dissemination of “covert propaganda.”

The phrase—generally associated with police-state dictatorships—was 
used by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the US 
Congress, in describing the proliferation of video news releases 
produced by the Pentagon, State Department and at least 18 other US 
agencies. The GAO ordered a halt to the dissemination of such videos on 
the grounds that they “conceal or do not clearly identify for the 
television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those 
materials.”

In a front-page article published Sunday, the New York Times detailed 
the government’s increasing use of the videos, which simulate genuine 
television news segments. They include the use of public relations 
employees posing as on-the-spot reporters and “interviews” with 
government officials that have been scripted and rehearsed.

The Times cited a report issued by Congressional Democrats estimating 
that during its first term the Bush administration spent $254 million 
on public relations contracts that pay for the production of these 
videos, nearly doubling the amount spent by the Clinton administration 
in its last four years.

It described a system in which thousands of such video news releases, 
or VNRs, are produced annually. They are sent out to television 
networks as well as local stations, which in turn broadcast them to 
tens of millions of viewers as if they were the independent product of 
the stations’ news departments.

In some cases, television producers edit out brief lines identifying 
the segments as having been produced by a government agency. In others, 
they have had their own reporters do new audio voice-overs, reading 
directly from scripts provided by the government.

Included in this massive propaganda operation is the production by the 
State Department and the Pentagon of video news segments aimed at 
selling the US war in Iraq to the American people. Various agencies 
have done television spots that attempt to cast controversial programs 
pushed by the Bush administration in the best possible light.

The US Defense Department has set up its own “Pentagon Channel,” 
providing fake news reports, interviews and video clips to US 
television stations. The State Department runs a vastly expanded Office 
of Broadcasting Services with the same purpose.

US Comptroller General David Walker drafted a February 17 memo 
denouncing the practice as a violation of appropriations laws that bar 
the use of government money to pay for covert propaganda directed 
against the American people.

In response, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued 
its own ruling last Friday. It stated that the administration “does not 
agree with the GAO that the covert propaganda prohibition applies 
simply because an agency’s role in producing and disseminating 
information is undisclosed or ‘covert,’ regardless of whether the 
content of the message is ‘propaganda.’”

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote on behalf of 
the administration: “Our view is that the prohibition does not apply 
where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and therefore it 
does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning 
the programs administered by an agency.”

At a Monday press conference, State Department spokesman Richard 
Boucher echoed this official line in defending the department’s own 
videos. “One, these are basic facts and material on what's going on in 
Afghanistan or Iraq or often in the United States related to important 
issues,” he said. “And it’s not — I wouldn’t describe it as propaganda. 
It’s, you know, video clips that are put together and people can use to 
report on things.”

At his Wednesday press conference, President Bush mocked a reporter’s 
question of why the government did not include clear attribution in its 
“pre-packaged reports.” Imitating the closing line of his own campaign 
commercials, Bush replied, “You mean a disclosure, ‘I’m George W. Bush 
and I...[authorized this message].’”

The Times report points to a symbiotic relationship between the 
government and the media that underlies the use of the video news 
releases, while attributing the media’s complicity largely to the 
economics of public relations and television news.

The report states: “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.”

In an editorial published Wednesday, the Washington Post condemned the 
government’s practice as “illegal and unwise,” while lamenting, “It’s 
humiliating that local news stations, however short-staffed and 
desperate for footage, would allow themselves to be used this way.”

What is strikingly absent from these assessments is any analysis of the 
political and ideological tendencies within the media itself that that 
has made the broadcast of covert government propaganda not only 
acceptable, but largely indistinguishable from the material prepared by 
the television networks themselves.

In a protracted process that has reached a qualitatively new level with 
the coming to power of the current Bush administration and the 
launching of the illegal war in Iraq, the media has largely embraced 
the mission of propagandizing for the government and corporate 
interests. Now, the government along with private corporations is 
systematically developing its own covert propaganda, mimicking the 
forms of television news. The end result is something akin to the 
funhouse hall of mirrors in which the images presented to the American 
people are a gross distortion of reality.

The controversy over the government’s dissemination of propaganda 
masquerading as news comes in the wake of a series of scandals that are 
noteworthy both for what they reveal about the Bush administration’s 
manipulation of the media and for the relative indifference of the 
media itself.

Earlier this year it was revealed that Education Department had paid 
$240,000 to right-wing commentator Armstrong Williams as part of 
“minority outreach” on behalf of the Bush administration’s “No Child 
Left Behind” Act. Williams used his syndicated column and radio and 
television appearances to tout the act, without publicly disclosing 
that he was a paid shill for the government.

Similar, though less expensive, contracts with right-wing columnists to 
promote the administration’s sexual abstinence and marriage agenda were 
subsequently exposed.

Then there is the strange case of James Guckert—AKA Jeff Gannon—the 
right-wing political operative who was allowed to masquerade as a 
member of the White House press corps for two years—receiving daily 
passes under his assumed name. There is ample reason to believe that 
Guckert/Gannon was planted in the pressroom to serve up softball 
questions designed to deflect attempts at more serious probing by White 
House correspondents.

He came under scrutiny after a January 26 press conference where he was 
called upon by Bush—something that is almost always prearranged. He 
delivered an ideological non-question, asking the president how he 
could work with Senate Democrats “who seem to have divorced themselves 
from reality.”

Investigations by Internet bloggers and web sites disclosed that Gannon 
was in fact Guckert, and that he was both a proprietor and featured 
attraction on several Internet sites promoting male prostitution with a 
gay military theme—hotmilitarystud.com, militaryescort.com, etc. The 
so-called news web site that he represented was the property of a 
leading Texas Republican and Bush confidante, Bobby Eberle.

It was also revealed that Guckert/Gannon appeared to have been given 
access to an internal CIA memo that exposed the wife of Ambassador Joe 
Wilson as a covert CIA agent. The administration organized a leak of 
the memo in retaliation for Wilson’s debunking of claims that the Iraqi 
regime of Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium in the African 
nation of Niger for its non-existent nuclear program. Guckert/Gannon 
admitted to being questioned by FBI agents in connection with the 
affair.

One can only imagine the uproar that would have ensued had it been 
discovered that the Clinton administration had provided similarly 
favorable treatment—and possibly state secrets—to an individual 
moonlighting as a prostitute—regardless of his or her gender or sexual 
orientation.

Yet the Gannon affair—like the revelations concerning the 
administration’s dissemination of covert propaganda and payola to 
commentators—has for the most part been treated as a minor 
embarrassment by the corporate media. None of these revelations of 
blatant government manipulation of the press has received a fraction of 
the attention given two years ago to the journalistic peccadilloes of 
Jayson Blair, a junior reporter at the New York Times found to have 
fabricated some quotes and plagiarized some details on relatively 
inconsequential stories.

This reaction amounts to a guilty silence. These incidents are not 
aberrations, but rather symptomatic of both a corporate-controlled 
media that routinely agrees to serve as a conduit for government 
propaganda and the advanced state of decay pervading democratic 
processes in the United States.

The administration’s defiant insistence on its “right” to peddle 
propaganda to an unsuspecting public is matched by the acquiescence of 
the mass media in promoting stories and broadcasting images aimed at 
deceiving rather than informing or exposing. This insidious partnership 
found its consummate expression two years ago in the preparation of the 
war of aggression against Iraq based upon lies that the media parroted.

Giant corporations control all the television networks, while a few 
major conglomerates have systematically consolidated their grip over 
virtually all the country’s newspapers. Corporate interests predominate 
from top to bottom, while the media has spawned a caste of 
multi-millionaire “personalities,” whose fortunes are directly tied to 
their connections with the leading figures in the government and big 
business.

This is the objective environment that facilitates the Bush 
administration’s employment of the type of “covert propaganda” 
techniques against the American people that in an earlier epoch were 
reserved for the use of the CIA in destabilizing foreign governments.

The Bush administration has always devoted enormous resources to the 
manipulation of visual images and the propagation of political slogans 
designed to advance and mask its predatory policies. The increasing 
turn toward the blatant methods of phony news reports, paid-off 
commentators and operatives posing as reporters, however, is 
characteristic of a regime in crisis, one which desperately fears that 
if the extent of its crimes becomes known, it will face uncontrollable 
political upheavals.