The drive for more publicly-funded propaganda will go on unabated

There was a tremendous front-page piece in the New York Times yesterday on the Bush administration’s outrageous proclivity for creating fake news segments — with our money — to get its message out to news outlets nationwide. The story painted a painful picture, but let’s not lose sight of the punch-line.

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.

It’s truly breathtaking. The Bush gang creates fake news segments that make the administration look great, package them neatly for news outlets (including handy pre-written scripts for anchors), and viewers are none the wiser. In all, the administration spent $254 million in its first term on these public relations contracts.

Is this all legal? It certainly looks that way. A series of non-partisan investigations launched by the Government Accountability Office concluded that the administration was exceeding legal limits on taxpayer-financed propaganda because the public was watching the news segments, but remained unaware that the pieces were fraudulent and created by the government. Just a few weeks ago, the GAO said the administration may not legally 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.”

But here’s the funny part: the Bush administration has announced that it doesn’t care.

[O]n 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. (emphasis added)

Get it? The administration can use our money to create fake news segments, tout administration policies and initiatives, never tell viewers that the segments were created by the government, and the whole endeavor is perfectly legal — in their minds — so long as the videos are “purely informational.” Who gets to decide if the Bush administration’s fake news segments meet that standard? The Bush administration does. What if the non-partisan GAO disagrees? Ignore it.

The Government Accountability Office is, in effect, the investigative arm of Congress, offering lawmakers neutral legal analyses and policy critiques upon request. It does not, however, have any enforcement mechanisms. It can tell lawmakers when the White House is breaking the law, but it can’t do anything about it.

So, what’s to be done? Congress could intervene, but that’s almost too silly to even imagine. The Justice Department may want to enforce the law in this area, but that, too, is a long shot. The FCC could investigate on disclosure regulations, and the very clever folks at Stop Fake News.org are pursuing this angle.

And, finally, I haven’t thought this through entirely, but I’m also wondering whether some kind of class-action suit might be a possibility. Maybe congressional Dems would have standing? I’m open to suggestion.