The scandal grows...... as if this fucking administration hasn't already given us enough reason to riot in the streets......
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http://www.suntimes.com/output/marin...t-carol28.html
No U.S. accountability in propaganda scandals
January 28, 2005
BY CAROL MARIN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
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My friend, Kris Kridel, anchors the "Noon Business Hour" on NewsRadio 780. I listen whenever I can, partly because she's my friend and partly because I usually learn something.
When Kris interviews financial analysts or brokers who tout one stock or bond over another, she regularly asks this question: "Do you or does your firm have any positions in these investments?"
In other words, are you saying what you're saying because it's true? Or because you're being paid to make a pitch?
We have now reached the sorry state of journalism where the question needs to be turned on the questioner.
There is a new scandal in our midst, and it appears to be growing.
Earlier this month, USA Today broke the story of Armstrong Williams, a syndicated columnist, radio commentator and CNN and CNBC talking head who quietly was paid $240,000 of your and my tax dollars by the U.S. Education Department. He earned that money by shilling for President Bush's controversial No Child Left Behind initiative.
We weren't supposed to know about that little deal. The money was funneled through Ketchum PR, the same folks that brought us Karen Ryan last year. Remember her? She was the "reporter" who really wasn't, appearing in "news reports" that really weren't. They were video news releases sent off to television stations across the country touting the Medicare prescription drug bill. That was the bill in which the administration lied to Congress and the public about the price tag, saying it would cost a mere $395 billion, when the government's own internal analyst had concluded it would cost much, much more, $551 billion. None of that was revealed until after the bill had passed.
Now, this week, one more revelation courtesy of the Washington Post, which reported Wednesday that syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher, a big supporter of another Bush program, the "Healthy Marriage" initiative, was also quietly picking up government checks. Gallagher got $21,500 from the Department of Health and Human Services and another $20,000 from the Justice Department, according to the Post.
Both Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher have said they're sorry if it looks like they are journalistic sellouts. They assure us they really are not.
And the administration? What does it say? Well, which time?
When the Karen-Ryan-Is-Not-A-Real-Reporter story first broke in early 2004, the administration claimed it was an "isolated case."
That isolated case has now multiplied.
The president this week said, "We didn't know about this at the White House."
Funny, the Government Accountability Office did. The GAO, according to published reports, has at least two investigations under way dating to last year. And it has already ruled that this kind of "covert propaganda" is illegal.
There's a name for it.
Payola.
It used to apply, says former FCC Chairman Newton Minow, to radio stations taking money under the table to promote music by record companies. That was bad enough, he says, "but when you have the government involved it's worse because you're fooling or misleading the public that's paying them to represent them."
This is a critical time in this country when it comes to news.
Yes, there have been scandals, including the recent ones involving the New York Times and reporter Jayson Blair. And the debacle over at CBS with Dan Rather.
But as bad as they were, there was disclosure and there were consequences. Heads rolled.
What about the government?
We have not had disclosure in the matter of this taxpayer-provided propaganda. Who approved it? Who ordered it? Since it's illegal, who's been charged?
I can answer that last one.
No one.
Yet at this very moment, Chicago's own U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, in the name of national security, is doing all he can with the approval of the Bush administration to force reporters to reveal their sources and compromise the confidentiality on which their reporting depends or go to jail.
Ironically, at the same time, the U.S. president is claiming that there needs to be a "nice, independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press."
I agree with the president.
The urgent issues facing this country and the world require that we in journalism do much more than we have ever done to clean up the mess in our own profession and at the same time not cower in fear when it comes to confronting the unconscionable ways this administration has tried to pervert our work.