WASHINGTON, 16 March 2005 — The White House wants to continue to produce “video news releases” that appear to be television news stories, and has told US government officials to ignore a Government Accountability Office (GAO) memo criticizing the practice as illegal propaganda.
The message, in memos sent Friday to federal agency heads and general counsels, contradicts a Feb. 17 memo from Comptroller General David Walker who wrote that such stories — designed to resemble independently reported broadcast news stories so that TV stations can run them without editing — violate provisions in US appropriation laws that ban covert propaganda.
The New York Times reported the existence of the memos Sunday. It said at least 20 federal agencies, from the Defense Department to the Census Bureau, had adopted the technique of distributing prepackaged reports and scripted interviews with Bush administration officials to television stations.
Many of the segments were broadcast in some of America’s largest cities as actual news, without any acknowledgement from the broadcaster that they were in fact government releases. Congressional Democrats estimate that the Bush administration has spent $254 million on public relations contracts during its four-year term, nearly double that spent by the Clinton administration.
Walker said Monday his agency is “disappointed by the administration’s actions” in telling agency heads to ignore the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.
“This is not just a legal issue, it’s also an ethical matter,” Walker said. “The taxpayers have a right to know when the government is trying to influence them with their own money.”
Walker wrote that the video news releases “are intended to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public by independent television news organizations. To help accomplish this goal, these stories include actors or others hired to portray ‘reporters’ and may be accompanied by suggested scripts that television news anchors can use to introduce the story during the broadcast.”
“Thank you, Bush. Thank you, USA,” a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of “another success” in the Bush administration’s “drive to strengthen aviation security”; the reporter called it “one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history.” A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration’s determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news, unaware that the federal government produced all three.
Former White House Press Secretary, Mike McCurry, who held the job in the Clinton administration, said there was a “considerable amount of video news release activity” during those years, but much of it was limited to raw footage.”
Democrats said yesterday they will try to attach language to an appropriations bill to clarify that taxpayer money cannot be spent on such productions.
They noted that following revelations this year that the Administration had paid conservative commentators and journalists to promote their policies. Bush later directed agencies to abandon such clandestine public relations practices.
“Whether in the form of a payment to an actual journalist, or through the creation of a fake one, it is wrong to deceive the public with the creation of phony news stories,” the lawmakers wrote.
