The Bush administration broke the law by disseminating “covert propaganda” according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). So reports Robert Pear in the New York Times. When the administration paid Armstrong Williams to create favorable news from whole cloth about Bush’s education polices, it was clearly illegal, according to the auditors from the independent and nonpartisan accountability office.
When the administration’s contract with Williams became public, Bush distanced himself by saying his “agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet” in a January press conference. Meanwhile, Bush’s Education Department—through which the payments to Williams were funnelled—defended the paid editorials as “no more than the legitimate dissemination of information to the public.” According to Pear’s report in the Times, “the GAO said the Education Department had no money or authority to ‘procure favorable commentary in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition’ in federal law.”
The GAO report‘s findings, dated 12 May 2005, appear to be in direct contradiction to a March ruling by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that federal agencies are not required to disclose their production of television news segments so long as those news segments are factual. Firmly spanking the Justice Department, the GAO auditors wrote:
“The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing.”
As if that weren’t bad enough, Bush’s Education Department is apparently unable to account for all of the services for which Williams billed the federal agency.
The question is why President Bush hasn’t been impeached. He flat lied to get us into a war on Iraq; he completely mismanaged a national disaster; and now he’s been exposed using public funds to disseminate propaganda.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.