propaganda

GAO: Bush White House broke the law by paying Armstrong Williams to disseminate propaganda

What to say? Now they're criminals too. Or still. The GAO also uncovered another instance of the administration illegally spreading domestic propaganda. Lovely. Oh yeah, and the GAO laywers said the Bush administration is wrong about their contention that it's ok for them to issue video news releases pretending to be real news stories, but in fact they're pro-Bush propaganda.

Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.

When I did work with the government years ago, the issue of propagandizing to the domestic market was anathema. You simply did not do it. We could even submit the Web page we built to Yahoo and Google because they were American-owned companies, and by submitting them we'd be propagandizing to Americans - or so they worried. How screwy is that? But it shows how serious this issue is, how seriously some people in government take it. But not the Bushies. Lie to the American people, propagandize to them lik we're the Soviet Union or communist China. No big deal.

In the course of its work, the accountability office discovered a previously undisclosed instance in which the Education Department had commissioned a newspaper article. The article, on the "declining science literacy of students," was distributed by the North American Precis Syndicate and appeared in numerous small newspapers around the country. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article, which praised the department's role in promoting science education.

(Americablog)