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["Melody O." <melody AT crecon.com>]

The article is eight pages long, but is filled with good info.  It is now
apparent to me why TV watchers think that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
are good and helpful, and why people support the Bush administration so
much.  

Below are snips from the article:

Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government
Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the
federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news
segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin
is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is
whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding,
the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports
"that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing
audience that the agency was the source of those materials."

It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have
much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making
television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice
Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum
instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings.
The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert
propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government.
Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not
an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers. 

<snip>

Federal agencies have been commissioning video news releases since at least
the first Clinton administration. An increasing number of state agencies
are producing television news reports, too; the Texas Parks and Wildlife
Department alone has produced some 500 video news releases since 1993. 

Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be producing more
releases, and on a broader array of topics.

<snip>

Those words are from the code of ethics of the Radio-Television News
Directors Association, the main professional society for broadcast news
directors in the United States. Some stations go further, all but
forbidding the use of any outside material, especially entire reports. And
spurred by embarrassing publicity last year about Karen Ryan, the news
directors association is close to proposing a stricter rule, said its
executive director, Barbara Cochran.

Whether a stricter ethics code will have much effect is unclear; it is not
hard to find broadcasters who are not adhering to the existing code, and
the association has no enforcement powers.

The Federal Communications Commission does, but it has never disciplined a
station for showing government-made news segments without disclosing their
origin, a spokesman said.

<snip>

Could it? Several lawyers experienced with F.C.C. rules say yes. They point
to a 2000 decision by the agency, which stated, "Listeners and viewers are
entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded." 

In interviews, more than a dozen station news directors endorsed this view
without hesitation. Several expressed disdain for the prepackaged segments
they received daily from government agencies, corporations and special
interest groups who wanted to use their airtime and credibility to sell or
influence.

But when told that their stations showed government-made reports without
attribution, most reacted with indignation. Their stations, they insisted,
would never allow their news programs to be co-opted by segments fed from
any outside party, let alone the government.

"They're inherently one-sided, and they don't offer the possibility for
follow-up questions - or any questions at all," said Kathy Lehmann Francis,
until recently the news director at WDRB, the Fox affiliate in Louisville, Ky.

Yet records from Video Monitoring Services of America indicate that WDRB
has broadcast at least seven Karen Ryan segments, including one for the
government, without disclosing their origin to viewers.

Mike Stutz, news director at KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego, was
equally opposed to putting government news segments on the air. 

"It amounts to propaganda, doesn't it?" he said.

<snip>

Afghanistan to Memphis: An Agency's Report Ends Up on the Air

On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the
anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how assistance
from the United States was helping to liberate the women of Afghanistan.

Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once barred
from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their burkas, taking up
jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters off to new schools,
receiving decent medical care for the first time and even participating in
a fledgling democracy. Her segment included an interview with an Afghan
teacher who recounted how the Taliban only allowed boys to attend school.
An Afghan doctor described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians
treat women.

In short, Ms. Clark's report seemed to corroborate, however modestly, a
central argument of the Bush foreign policy, that forceful American
intervention abroad was spreading freedom, improving lives and winning
friends.

What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the interviews
used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The
contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and shot
the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the narration, much
of which Ms. Clark repeated with only minor changes. 

 Advertisement
 
 
As it happens, the viewers of WHBQ were not the only ones in the dark. 

Ms. Clark, now Tish Clark Dunning, said in an interview that she, too, had
no idea the report originated at the State Department. "If that's true, I'm
very shocked that anyone would false report on anything like that," she said. 

How a television reporter in Memphis unwittingly came to narrate a segment
by the State Department reveals much about the extent to which
government-produced news accounts have seeped into the broader new media
landscape.

The explanation begins inside the White House, where the president's
communications advisers devised a strategy after Sept. 11, 2001, to
encourage supportive news coverage of the fight against terrorism. The
idea, they explained to reporters at the time, was to counter charges of
American imperialism by generating accounts that emphasized American
efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq.

An important instrument of this strategy was the Office of Broadcasting
Services, a State Department unit of 30 or so editors and technicians whose
typical duties include distributing video from news conferences. But in
early 2002, with close editorial direction from the White House, the unit
began producing narrated feature reports, many of them promoting American
achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq and reinforcing the administration's
rationales for the invasions. These reports were then widely distributed in
the United States and around the world for use by local television
stations. In all, the State Department has produced 59 such segments. 

United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the domestic
dissemination of government propaganda. The 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, for
example, allows Voice of America to broadcast pro-government news to
foreign audiences, but not at home. Yet State Department officials said
that law does not apply to the Office of Broadcasting Services. In any
event, said Richard A. Boucher, a State Department spokesman: "Our goal is
to put out facts and the truth. We're not a propaganda agency."

Even so, as a senior department official, Patricia Harrison, told Congress
last year, the Bush administration has come to regard such "good news"
segments as "powerful strategic tools" for influencing public opinion. And
a review of the department's segments reveals a body of work in sync with
the political objectives set forth by the White House communications team
after 9/11.

In June 2003, for example, the unit produced a segment that depicted
American efforts to distribute food and water to the people of southern
Iraq. "After living for decades in fear, they are now receiving assistance
- and building trust - with their coalition liberators," the unidentified
narrator concluded. 

Several segments focused on the liberation of Afghan women, which a White
House memo from January 2003 singled out as a "prime example" of how "White
House-led efforts could facilitate strategic, proactive communications in
the war on terror." 

<snip>

But Tish Clark Dunning said it was her impression at the time that the
Afghan segment was her station's version of one done first by network
correspondents at either Fox News or CNN. It is not unusual, she said, for
a local station to take network reports and then give them a hometown look.

"I didn't actually go to Afghanistan," she said. "I took that story and
reworked it. I had to do some research on my own. I remember looking on the
Internet and finding out how it all started as far as women covering their
faces and everything." 

<snip>

Mr. Gee, the news director, readily acknowledges that these accounts are
not exactly independent, tough-minded journalism. But, he added: ''We don't
think they're propaganda. They meet our journalistic standards. They're
informative. They're balanced.'' 

More than a year ago, WCIA asked the Agriculture Department to record a
special sign-off that implies the segments are the work of WCIA reporters.
So, for example, instead of closing his report with ''I'm Bob Ellison,
reporting for the U.S.D.A.,'' Mr. Ellison says, ''With the U.S.D.A., I'm
Bob Ellison, reporting for 'The Morning Show.''' 

Mr. Gee said the customized sign-off helped raise ''awareness of the name
of our station.'' Could it give viewers the idea that Mr. Ellison is
reporting on location with the U.S.D.A. for WCIA? ''We think viewers can
make up their own minds,'' Mr. Gee said. 

<snip>

Yet sometimes the ''good news'' approach carries political meaning,
intended or not. Such was the case after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal
surfaced last spring. Although White House officials depicted the abuse of
Iraqi detainees as the work of a few rogue soldiers, the case raised
serious questions about the training of military police officers. 

A short while later, Mr. Gilliam's unit distributed a news segment, sent to
34 stations, that examined the training of prison guards at Fort Leonard
Wood in Missouri, where some of the military police officers implicated at
Abu Ghraib had been trained. 

''One of the most important lessons they learn is to treat prisoners
strictly but fairly,'' the reporter said in the segment, which depicted a
regimen emphasizing respect for detainees. A trainer told the reporter that
military police officers were taught to ''treat others as they would want
to be treated.'' The account made no mention of Abu Ghraib or how the
scandal had prompted changes in training at Fort Leonard Wood. 

According to Mr. Gilliam, the report was unrelated to any effort by the
Defense Department to rebut suggestions of a broad command failure. 

''Are you saying that the Pentagon called down and said, 'We need some good
publicity?''' he asked. ''No, not at all.'' 


Anne E. Kornblut contributed reporting for this article.