it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the
governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was
abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.
The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and
inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose
deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press
is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and
sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and
shell." -- Justice Black. NYT v. US. 403 US 713
In the past few months, there has been one revelation after another about
attempts by government agencies to influence the news that Americans see, hear
and read. The number of incidents reached such a level in February that the
Government Accountability Office, the agency that acts as watchdog over the
federal government, issued a warning to all federal agencies that the use of video
news releases packaged like news stories to promote government policies could
violate a government ban on using taxpayer funds for propaganda.
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a
well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news
report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch
everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal
agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made
and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years,
records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations
across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their
production.
November 30, 2005
WASHINGTON — As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is
secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in
an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.
Why was a partisan hack, using an alias and with no journalism background, given
repeated access to daily White House press briefings?
"The present president has a decidedly different view of the news media's role. His
administration sees the press as a thing to be bought. In fact, while political
manipulation of the news is hardly new, Team Bush has a long and singularly
sordid record of trying to turn the media into a wholly owned public relations
subsidiary."
Nothing puts the lie to the Bush Administration's absurd claim that it invaded Iraq
to spread democracy throughout the Middle East more decisively than its ceaseless
attacks on Al Jazeera, the institution that has done more than any other to break
the stranglehold over information previously held by authoritarian forces, whether
monarchs, military strongmen, occupiers or ayatollahs.
