Bush Administration Deceives Public with Fake News

[97silverlsc]

Bush Administration Deceives Public with Fake News

March 14, 2005

The New York Times reported this weekend on the Bush administration's extensive abuse of public funds and trust in producing television propaganda. Over the past four years, at least 20 different federal agencies have been involved in producing hundreds of fake TV news segments, many of which were "subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production," according to the Times.

* The Bush administration has spent one quarter of a billion dollars in taxpayer funds to produce phony government PR. Since President Bush took office in 2001, the White House has spent at least $254 million on fake "news" segments and other public relations schemes. In a now-infamous segment by the Department of Health and Human Services, a PR official named Karen Ryan posed as a reporter interviewing then-Secretary Tommy Thompson. The Government Accountability Office found the agency "designed and executed" her segments "to be indistinguishable from news stores produced by private sector television news organizations," according to the Times.

* The administration willfully violates government restrictions on "covert propaganda." The non-partisan Government Accounting Office, the non-partisan investigative branch of Congress, has forbidden federal agencies from creating prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials." The administration's response? The NY Times reports that on Friday, "the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the GAO findings."

* Congress or the courts should immediately intervene to stop the Bush administration’s corrupt use of taxpayer funds. The legislative or judicial branches of government should exercise its constitutional duties to immediately force the executive branch to stop deceiving the public. This abuse of executive power is an affront to all Americans and violates basic tenets of our democracy. If President Bush won't put his money where his mouth is on "spreading democracy" by adhering to it at home, the other branches of government should step in to give him a reminder.

 

[barry2952]

The lies are to keep us in a "state of fear" as discussed in another thread.

History will remember GWB as the "Worst President Ever". Mark my words.

 

[JohnnyBz00LS]

His buddy Arnold got busted doing the same thing in CA, spending tax$ on propaganda.

BuSh has a long history of manipulating public opinion by hand-picking attendees at "town-hall" type public appearances. He did it during his re-defeat campaign, and he's doing it again selling his Social Security plan.

"Muffle all opposition and don't let them have a word." Sounds communistic to me. Yet a significant number of voters are so gullible to buy that crap without question.
:Bang

 

[MonsterMark]

With as much head pounding that you do Johnny, are you sure all faculties are still intact.

Come on. Now Bushy is a commy? And a propagandist? Keep drinking the Kool-Aid guys. This is good humor.

 

[97silverlsc]

Typical "head in the sand" repug response. Proven wrong doing by their boy and the response is "keep drinking the cool aid" . Think the repugs have been over sampling that product!!!

 

[MonsterMark]

Have any previous administrations conducted themselves in this manner, or is this exclusive to GW? Just asking, don't know. And if the example quoted is the most egregious to have happened, it is no wonder this thing never gained traction. If there was something to it, you know the liberal media would be crawling all over it.

 

[Kbob]

Not saying that I agree with the method, but was the content of the govt. produced features truthful and factual? The tone of the article suggests they were. Of course I understand the error in this "reporting" practice. Critical questions will not be asked and real problems will not be acknowledged. And I think instead of "communist", a more accurate term some of you may want to describe President Bush as is "fascist".

Honestly it's not that I don't see many of your points against Bush. But most of the time it's like accusing a neighbor of being the devil incarnate because he cheated a little on his taxes.

 

[MonsterMark]

If the Republicans are guilty of this, I think it is safe to say the Democrats are guilty of 10 times worse.

 

[97silverlsc]

ANDRÉS MARTINEZ
Truth Is, Bush's Propaganda Hurts the U.S.

ANDRÉS MARTINEZ
When I was growing up in Mexico, we subscribed to the local Chihuahua newspaper and a Mexico City paper whose arrival around lunchtime was a much-anticipated treat — it had a far better sports section. My exposure to U.S. news in that pre-Internet, pre-satellite-TV era was intermittent, mostly by way of the El Paso Times and Time magazine.

If my worldview had been entirely shaped by media, I would have believed that one of the two countries separated by the Rio Grande was a mess, a total basket case, and the other a prosperous democracy envied around the world. But I would have gotten it backward.

It was Mexico's TV and newspapers, tightly controlled by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, that trumpeted the wonders of the nation's democracy, economic progress and social cohesion. Candor seemed to seep only into those treasured sports pages.

American media, by contrast, were brimming with woe. You would have thought it was only a matter of days before the U.S. would disintegrate.

Two decades later, it's troubling to see Washington emulating the PRI's media strategy, and it's especially troubling to those of us who have lived in other countries and always admired the distinctive candor of public discourse in this country.

Spin is nothing new in American politics, but the Bush administration has not contented itself with trying to influence the news. It's in the business of producing the news itself, in the hopes of passing it off as generic, third-party reporting. This is propaganda parading as journalism, in the finest PRI (or Soviet) tradition. As the New York Times reported Sunday, at least 20 federal agencies have been peddling TV news segments to local stations across the country. Viewers have been treated to news reports of happy farmers, happy air travelers and happy beachgoers without ever knowing that these happy but fake news reports were produced by the Agriculture Department, the Transportation Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.

This clumsy branding of George W. Bush's vision of America to Americans will not only backfire at home, it invariably subverts efforts to brand America overseas. Public candor and transparency are supposed to be one of the American brand's distinguishing assets. Because the administration insists on operating in its imagined version of reality, the U.S. and American credibility begin to look rather commonplace — and unreliable — to the world. You can imagine how many conspiracy theories are fed and validated on the streets of Cairo and Tehran when word gets out that U.S. government agencies produce their own propagandistic "news" reports.

Monday's naming of Karen Hughes as the State Department's global spinmeister — the undersecretary of State for public diplomacy and public affairs — should make matters worse. She is close to Bush and closely associated with his remarkably evasive communications strategy. This White House stays relentlessly on message, even if the facts mock its discipline. Hence there have always been enough troops in Iraq, the budget deficit is under control and will remain so even if we give ourselves another round of tax cuts, and, yes, the Social Security system is in a state of crisis that only private accounts can cure. Most damaging to the American image in the Arab world, and to global perceptions that U.S. leaders are held accountable by reality, was Bush's insistence that prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere hadn't stained Donald Rumsfeld's swell performance as secretary of Defense.

It must be tempting for the leader of the sole superpower to imagine that he can define reality and impose it on the rest of world. But it's a dangerous temptation as the United States, for all its might, depends to an alarming degree on the trust of foreigners — increasingly the trust of a handful of Asian central banks — who are financing the nation's rising debt. The United States borrows $2 billion a day from overseas to maintain Americans' lavish lifestyle — a factoid you won't hear about in any taxpayer-financed fake news report.

Foreign central banks buy U.S. currency, in the form of Treasury notes, the way you buy stock in a company. Trouble is, they also can sell it the way you can dump stock when you lose faith in a company. The plummeting dollar is a global vote of no confidence in Brand U.S.A. and its current management. This decline is likely to accelerate if the administration doesn't begin to be more candid about the nation's real problems, such as the government's budgetary shortfalls, and take them on. Foreign investors don't want to trust their money to a country governed by propagandists. That's why they invested in the U.S. in the first place.

 

[JohnnyBz00LS]

:I

Slowly but surely, the GOP is selling-out America to foreign contries through this skyrocketing national debt. At this rate, it won't be long before we are all learning a foreign language.

:Bang