Posted on 03/25/2005 5:31:19 PM PST by Crackingham
Congressional investigators will look into whether the Bush administration violated any laws when it paid syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher to help promote a marriage initiative, Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy and Frank Lautenberg said.
The Government Accountability Office told the two senators, who had requested the inquiry, that it would investigate in a letter sent to their offices late Thursday.
The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, is already looking into the Education Department's relationship with several public relations firms, which includes the agency's $240,000 contract with syndicated columnist and TV personality Armstrong Williams. The Education Department had hired Williams to promote the No Child Left Behind law.
The two senators had asked the GAO to expand its investigation to include Gallagher.
Gallagher apologized in January to readers for not disclosing a $21,500 contract with the Health and Human Services Department to help create materials promoting the agency's $300 million initiative to encourage marriage. Gallagher said she was not paid to promote marriage but to write articles and brochures.
"My lifelong experience in marriage research, public education and advocacy is the reason HHS hired me," she wrote in her column.
The GAO said its investigation of Gallagher will focus on whether her contract with HHS violated federal law banning the use of public money for publicity or propaganda.
Lautenberg said the Bush administration has violated he trust of the American people.
"The Bush administration is manufacturing propaganda, plain and simple," said Lautenberg, of New Jersey.
"The president should put in place sound policies that benefit all Americans rather than pay the press to promote bad policies," said Kennedy of Massachusetts.
No one answered the telephone at the White House press office Friday regarding comment on the GAO investigation.
The Bush Administration has to PAY the media for favorable stories. The liberals get them for NOTHING.
Is this the first administration that paid journalists to secretly promote its views?
Ping.
Kennedy is grasping at straws. Usually they are in drinks.
Aren't we all relieved to know this is a priority on the Hill?
Can we get an investigation into who Kennedy and Lautenberg are getting perks from??
What else do they have but complaints and petty stuff?
Is Maggie Gallagher Russert's wife?
I seem to recall an administration that demanded that all sitcom scripts be run through the Office Of Narcotics Control (or something) in the White House, supposedly so that the correct messages on the Drug War were being sent. When caught, the White House and networks all said that no script had ever had its content changed or modified by White House staff for the purposes of antidrug messages.
I don't know
No, this is not the first administration to hire people who also work in the media. It was not secret though some of the people did not consistantly disclose their affiliation with the departments and President Bush has told the departments to stop the practice.
No. Mrs. Russert is Maureen Orth who writes for Vanity Fair.
Lautenberg said the Bush administration has violated he trust of the American people.
"The Bush administration is manufacturing propaganda, plain and simple," said Lautenberg, of New Jersey.
If the administration's department had a program to encourage marriage and/or strengthen marriage, what's the cadaver's grounds for calling the advice of a mariage expert "propoganda" other than her views differ from his?
"The president should put in place sound policies that benefit all Americans rather than pay the press to promote bad policies," said Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Drunk Ted flunks again. They paid for her views. Sober up you fat bastard.
Thanks.
I knew she had an Irish name...lol.
Maureen.
She wrote program materials, she wasn't doing stealth commercials. That's legit. No evidence that she did anything in a cloumn that she wasn't already doing for years. The "outrage" is just more manufactured BS from the Democrats. r
Senator - I suggest you check your own back yard before attacking your neighbors'.
Not publicly disclosing information was an idiotic thing to do - however I see this as a witch hunt with the pot calling the kettle black on top of it.
I am in no way attempting to justify the non-disclosure, I just firmly believe that if they are so bent on doing such an investigation it needs to include ALL administrations and not just the current.
And in the light of my call for full disclosure - I was a reporter who covered the government and then became a lobbyist.........my first client was a small group who's opponents had fought mightily to get me fired from my job as a reporter. But there was a 4 year time between the 2 events and I knew none of those involved personally.
How the White House and the media package government propaganda as entertainment
By Barry Grey
24 January 2000
Over the past two years an agency of the Clinton White House, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), has secretly worked with all of the commercial television networks to broadcast anti-drug propaganda as part of the story lines of popular, prime time programs.
The networks agreed to weave the government's anti-drug message into TV scripts, in lieu of their legal obligation to broadcast, free of charge, government-sponsored public service ads against drug use. With the support of the White House and its so-called drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey, the networks were allowed to sell to private advertisers the air time that would otherwise have been devoted to anti-drug ads, reaping as a result tens of millions of dollars in additional revenues. At no time was the public informed that the programs it was viewing had been shaped and vetted by government officials.
This collusion between the media monopolies and the government for the purpose of manipulating public opinion only came to light when the Internet magazine Salon published an exposé on January 13. Since then all of the commercial networks—NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, WB and UPN—have acknowledged their participation in the plan, as has the Clinton administration and the ONDCP.
Among the television shows that have aired episodes with government-approved anti-drug messages are such highly-rated series as NBC's “ER,” CBS's “Chicago Hope,” ABC's “Home Improvement” and Fox's “Beverly Hills 90210.” Others include “The Practice,” “General Hospital,” “Sports Night,” “7th Heaven,” “The Wayan Brothers,” “Promised Land,” “Cosby,” “Trinity,” “Providence,” “The Drew Carey Show,” “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” and “Boy Meets World.” In all, White House drug policy officials scrutinized in advance more than 100 episodes on all of the major networks.
The collaboration began after Congress in late 1997 approved a five-year, $1 billion budget for the ONDCP to buy anti-drug advertisements. The law required the networks to provide one free ad for every ad paid for by the White House. The ads started running in the summer of 1998. However the networks soon began to complain about providing free air time, especially when the demand for TV ads shot up, fueled by the explosion of advertising by Internet companies.
The Clinton administration, always accommodating to the mercenary demands of big business, came up with the plan of inserting anti-drug messages into TV programs in order to pacify the networks. The ONDCP agreed to forego some of the ad time it had bought, and instead give the networks financial credits for airing entertainment programs with an approved message. This allowed the networks to resell the freed-up air time at the going commercial rate to corporate advertisers.
Alan Levitt, the drug-policy official running the campaign, told Salon the networks have thus far benefited from the scheme in the amount of nearly $25 million. Bob Wiener, a spokesman for General McCaffrey, said the drug office will pay the networks nearly $200 million to broadcast various anti-drug messages in commercials and during TV shows in the year that started last October 1.
The arrangement was known to only a few top media executives in Hollywood and New York. According to Salon almost none of the producers and writers who made the anti-drug episodes were aware of the deal between the networks and the White House drug office. But McCaffrey explained the arrangement at a hearing last October before an appropriations subcommittee of the House of Representatives. He outlined the complicated scale of financial credits allotted to the networks in return for TV episodes carrying an approved anti-drug message, in which the amount of air-time ceded back to the networks varied according to the length of the show and the time-slot it occupied.
One indication of how widespread the collusion between the networks and the ONDCP has become is the fact that the number of shows with anti-drug themes has risen from 32 as of last March to 109 this winter.
Spokesmen from all of the networks have denied any wrong-doing and insisted they in no way ceded “creative control” over scripts and programs to the government. White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said, “Gen. McCaffrey has been very innovative about getting anti-drug messages out and he is going to continue to do so.” Clinton himself declared, “There was no attempt to regulate content or tell people what they had to put into it. Of course, I wouldn't support that.”
But five of the networks have acknowledged that they sent either final drafts of scripts or tapes of completed shows to the advertising agency representing the drug office, and the smaller WB network, a subsidiary of Time Warner, conceded that it submitted scripts in progress from “Smart Guy” and “The Wayan Brothers.”
The collaboration between the government and the networks in disseminating propaganda in the form of entertainment may not be limited to the issue of drug use. The January 17 edition of “NewsHour,” the nightly news broadcast of the Public Broadcasting System, featured a segment on the White House-network anti-drug campaign. The PBS interviewer Terence Smith asked Dr. Donald Vereen, the deputy director of ONDCP, “Are there now messages in programming that had been agreed with the networks against tobacco or any other substances that we don't know about?”
Vereen answered, “Probably.” To which an obviously nonplussed Smith replied, “Probably?” Vereen rejoined, “I'm sure there are.”
In the wake of criticism from various media watchdog organizations and editorials in such newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post rebuking the networks and the White House, albeit mildly, ABC announced that it would no longer seek financial credits in return for airing programs approved by the drug czar's office. The network said it made the decision after the ONDCP began asking to see TV scripts before the shows were aired. And the ONDCP announced it would review its practice of giving the networks financial inducements for anti-drug messages in entertainment programs “to ensure that there is absolutely no suggestion or inference that the federal government is exercising any control whatsoever over the creative process.” However the White House drug office did not say it would discontinue the program.
It is noteworthy that Time Warner's WB network has been the most emphatic in defending its collaboration with the ONDCP and the most dismissive of public criticism. When the story broke, Jamie Kellner, the chief executive of WB, said, “We submitted the scripts to get their input and make sure we were handling the stories in the most responsible way.” He subsequently declared, “I'm amazed that this has been made into something that is important, when it is not.... This has nothing to do with the creative process. This is about accuracy, and it's offensive to challenge the motive.”
Leaving aside Kellner's umbrage over his motives—which were patently mercenary—tailoring the content of programs to meet the demands of the government is by no means a new practice for Time Warner. In July of 1998 the Time Warner subsidiary CNN publicly retracted a program it had broadcast the previous month documenting, with eyewitness testimony, a US army commando raid during the Vietnam War known as Operation Tailwind, in which deadly sarin nerve gas was allegedly used to kill US defectors who had fled to Laos.
When the Pentagon, Vietnam-era commandos and such influential figures as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell publicly and privately exerted pressure on CNN, the network quickly caved in. It commissioned a rigged inquiry to discredit the program, issued an abject apology and fired the documentary's two producers, April Oliver and Jack Smith.
The Tailwind episode is just one of several recent examples of media outlets suppressing investigative reports as a result of pressure from powerful corporations or government agencies. To name two: the San Jose Mercury-News withdrew an exposure of CIA ties to the crack cocaine traffic in south central Los Angeles and the Cincinnati Enquirer retracted a report on human rights violations by Chiquita Foods at its banana plantations in Central America.
Such episodes are only the most overt expressions of a process of media censorship and self-censorship that has become pervasive. For many years the mass media have with increasing openness served as instruments for promoting the basic foreign and domestic aims of the government and the corporate interests that dominate American politics. Above all the media have taken on the job of galvanizing public opinion behind US military interventions and vetting their coverage so as to exclude images of death and destruction. This reached its zenith in the massive and highly sophisticated campaign of propaganda and lies carried out to build support for the US-NATO war against Yugoslavia.
Any left-wing, or even liberal, critique of the social and political status quo has been virtually excluded from the air waves and the major print media. In what passes for news, as well as entertainment, nothing that seriously challenges the pro-market, right-wing consensus of the most wealthy and powerful layers of society is permitted.
This process has been reinforced by the increasing monopolization of the mass media. The major television networks in the US are now owned by a handful of corporate conglomerates—Disney (ABC), General Electric (NBC), Viacom (CBS), Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (Fox) and Time Warner (CNN and WB).
The marriage of the corporate-controlled media and the state is reflected as well in the personnel who occupy the uppermost ranks of reporters, news anchors and commentators. Millionaires and multimillionaires in their own right, they routinely hobnob with the so-called movers and shakers of the business and political world. The guest list at any major state function will include a significant number of TV news personalities and press commentators.
The monopolization of the mass media by a few corporate behemoths is inherently destructive of democracy. The direct collusion between the media giants and the government in packaging anti-drug propaganda as entertainment is the logical and organic outcome of the concentration of all means for disseminating information into fewer and fewer hands. It marks a new stage in the integration of the media into the capitalist state.
The claims of media spokesmen and government officials that the “creative process” was not infringed upon are largely besides the point. The fact is the networks and the federal government have been collaborating to manipulate the public by indoctrinating the viewing audience with messages vetted by the government, in the guise of entertainment and without the public's knowledge. If this is not a form of thought control, then the term has no meaning.
The exposure of this collusion underscores the enormous dangers raised by the new wave of mergers between media giants, telecommunications conglomerates and Internet providers, the most spectacular of which is America Online's buyout of Time Warner. The merged company will control not only a large portion of the content in news and entertainment available to the public—mass circulation magazines, broadcast and cable TV networks, film studios, record labels—but the avenues for circulating information—cable systems and the world's largest Internet provider.
In particular, this merger marks a major step in the efforts of big business and the state to rein in the Internet, the one medium that as of yet retains a significant element of free access and the open and democratic exchange of ideas. It is significant that the White House-media deal to secretly promote anti-drug propaganda was exposed by an Internet publication. This fact will not be lost on the media monopolies and the government. One can only assume it will intensify their determination to bring the Internet more firmly under their control.
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