The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
—Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), Nazi Propaganda Minister
Reporter Karen Ryan delivered the good news: George W. Bush’s controversial Medicare plan was going to be a huge success. “All people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending,” declared Ryan. She then interviewed Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services, who stated, “This is going to be the same Medicare system only with new benefits, more choices, more opportunities for enhanced benefits.”
Forty TV stations around the country carried the news segment in 2004, revealed a March 2005 New York Times exposé. There was no mention of the scandals surrounding the Medicare law, including how it was passed in November 2003 when Republican leaders in Congress kept the vote open until almost 6 A.M. as they threatened, bribed, and cajoled reluctant opponents into changing their votes. Nor was there any mention of criticism that the Medicare law, which bars the federal government from seeking competitive bids on drugs, was slammed by critics as a giveaway to pharmaceutical companies.1
Then there was the glowing report about the oft-criticized Transportation Security Administration. Reporter Jennifer Morrow explained how the TSA’s “top-notch work force”—roundly criticized elsewhere for security lapses, including missing one out of four fake bombs in a test at Newark Airport2—had led “one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history.” With a bustling airport security system humming smoothly for the camera, Morrow intoned, “Thousands leaving impressive careers and good jobs to take up the front lines in the war against terrorism.”3
As for the war on terror, it’s going great, thanks to President Bush. We know, because we saw an ecstatic Iraqi-American man on the evening news responding to the fall of Baghdad: “Thank you, Bush! Thank you, USA! I love Bush, I love USA, because they do that for Iraqi people’s freedom.”
Remarkable testimonials, compelling narratives—and all of them fake. These stories, which aired on American news programs, were each produced by the U.S. government. The “reporters” were public relations professionals hired by the government, often using pseudonyms, the Times reported.
This is the Bush administration’s version of “reality TV”: When they don’t like reality, they simply create an alternate reality. We call this propaganda when we hear about it in other countries. Here, TV networks pass along these fantasies as news.
Under the Bush administration, at least twenty federal agencies have spent $250 million creating hundreds of fake television news segments that are sent to local stations.4 State Department official Patricia Harrison (she became president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2005) told Congress in 2003 that the Bush administration considers its “good news” segments to be “powerful strategic tools” for influencing public opinion.5
The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, had a different term for it: “covert propaganda.”6 In four different reports issued in 2005, the GAO detailed how the Bush administration had broken the law. The administration’s response: The White House instructed the heads of all government agencies in a March 2005 letter to disregard the GAO findings on covert propaganda.7
The Bush administration intensified its efforts to disseminate domestic propaganda after 9/11. At that time, White House officials wanted positive news coverage of its so-called war on terror. When the U.S. media wasn’t sounding sufficiently enthusiastic, Bush operatives decided to create their own news. Officially, they said they wanted, according to the Times, “to counter charges of American imperialism by generating accounts that emphasized American efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq.”8
The State Department knew just where to turn: It already had an Office of BS (officially, the Office of Broadcast Services). Starting in early 2002, working closely with the White House, about thirty editors at the Office of BS—who previously spent their time distributing videos from press conferences—began churning out feature news reports promoting the Bush administration’s accomplishments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and promoting the case for war. The videos cleverly disguised their origins, offering journalist-like narration and sign-offs. In one case, a Memphis Fox affiliate ran an entire segment about Afghanistan, using a local news reporter to read the State Department script so it sounded like it had been produced locally. “After living for decades in fear,” reporter Tish Clark said on station WHBQ, Afghan women “are now receiving assistance—and building trust—with their coalition liberators.”9
The State Department has distributed these videos around the United States and the world. By early 2005, the Office of BS had produced fifty-nine such fake news segments. The Pentagon’s Army and Air Force Hometown News Service is also in the business of manufacturing news. In 2004, it created fifty stories that were broadcast 236 times, reaching 41 million American households.10
Numerous other government agencies have also been getting into the propaganda business. Fortunately for the Bush administration, many U.S. news organizations are eager to act as its mouthpiece. The aptly named television station WCIA in Champaign, Illinois, ran more than two dozen news segments made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in one three-month period in 2005. In one fawning piece about the government’s role in hurricane cleanup in Florida, a local official crowed about the USDA, “They’ve done a fantastic job.” Another quoted Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns describing President Bush as “the best envoy in the world.”11
Jim Gee, the news director at WCIA, defended having his station become a pipeline for government-produced “news” stories, telling the New York Times, “We don’t think they’re propaganda. They meet our journalistic standards. They’re informative. They’re balanced.”12
The GAO disagrees. In one of its investigations into the government’s fake news program, it concluded that video news releases from the Office of National Drug Control and Policy “constitute covert propaganda and violated the publicity or propaganda prohibition.”
That’s because the U.S. government is barred from using taxpayer funds to do its own PR. According to a federal statute cited by the GAO, “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”13
Another federal law governing propaganda dates to 1948. The Smith-Mundt Act forbids the government from disseminating propaganda within the United States, only permitting it abroad through such outlets as the Voice of America. Congress passed the law to ensure that a U.S. government agency could not brainwash citizens as Adolf Hitler had done in Germany.14 American citizens have no idea that their local TV stations are now fulfilling the same role.
Confronted with a public outcry following the fake news revelations, President Bush defended the practice. “This has been a longstanding practice of the federal government to use these types of videos,” he declared in March 2005. He suggested that it would be “helpful if local stations then disclosed to their viewers” that they were watching “news” produced by the government, but he added that “evidently, in some cases, that’s not the case.”
When not passing off government propaganda as news, many TV stations are repackaging corporate PR as news. The Center for Media and Democracy tracked how television newsrooms used thirty-six video news releases (VNRs) that were produced by three PR firms for a variety of corporations, including General Motors, Pfizer, and Capital One. Seventy-seven stations aired the VNRs ninety-eight times without disclosing to viewers that the material was produced by the companies. The VNRs typically promoted products in the course of the segment. According to the research, “Without exception, television stations actively disguised the sponsored content as their own reporting. In almost all cases, stations failed to balance the clients’ messages with independently gathered footage or basic journalistic research. More than one-third of the time, stations aired the prepackaged VNR in its entirety.”15
Robin Raskin, the “Queen of VNRs,” knows firsthand about how television stations use corporate-sponsored video news releases. Hired by companies such as Panasonic, Namco, and Techno Source, Raskin has appeared in numerous TV spots promoting their products while also attacking the competition. In one VNR on holiday gifts, Raskin, appearing as a technology expert, warned how an iPod (made by Apple, a competitor of Panasonic) could show what she called “iPorn.”
During an interview on Democracy Now!, Raskin defended her work but admitted that television stations need to disclose who is funding her segments. “I certainly do the best I can to inform the stations,” Raskin said.
But do the stations inform the viewers that she is a hired gun?
“It’s a hotly debated subject. . . . Nobody’s made a clear decision.”16
With media outlets prostituting their airwaves to special interest groups, it’s little wonder that some journalists are also dabbling in the world’s oldest profession. In an environment where the airwaves and front pages are sold to the highest silent bidder, government propagandists have had easy pickings from the Fourth Estate.
Paid-Off Pundits
Creating an alternate reality is a painstaking job that requires more than simply manufacturing news. Ideally, independent pundits should wax eloquent about a government program in order to lend it some street cred. This sleight of hand requires journalists to do some of the dirty work. For the Bush administration, finding shills-for-hire has not been difficult.
In January 2005, USA Today revealed that conservative columnist Armstrong Williams had been paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to tout the virtues of the No Child Left Behind Act. The deal stipulated that Williams “would regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts and would work with African-American newspapers to place stories and commentary on NCLB.” Williams would also provide “department officials with the option to appear as studio guests to discuss NCLB and other important education reform issues.” The conservative commentator would also use “his long-term working relationship with America’s Black Forum [an African-American news program] to encourage the producers to periodically address NCLB.”17 He would also produce two TV ads promoting NCLB.
In short, Armstrong Williams offered to use his cover as a journalist to be a one-stop propaganda shop for the Bush administration. In his come-on to the Department of Education, he promised to “win the battle for media space [through] favorable commentaries [that] will amount to passive endorsements from the media outlets that carry them.”18
Williams delivered on his promise to prostitute himself. He penned sycophantic articles gushing that the No Child Left Behind Act “has provided more funds to poor children than any other education bill in this country’s history,” and that Education Secretary Rod Paige “has long been at the forefront of the movement to increase educational options for underprivileged students.”19
The GAO investigated the Williams case and once again determined that the Education Department violated the law by disseminating “covert propaganda.”20 Williams claimed to have performed “168 activities other than ads . . . promoting NCLB.” But the Department of Education could provide the GAO with only one of his columns as evidence.21
Another hack for hire is Maggie Gallagher, a syndicated columnist who backed President Bush’s $300 million initiative promoting marriage as a way of strengthening families. She wrote in National Review Online, “The Bush marriage initiative would . . . educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage.” She added that this could “carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children.”22 But there was one other big payoff of the marriage initiative that Gallagher failed to mention: the one she received from Bush’s Department of Health and Human Services. It turns out that in 2002, Gallagher was paid $21,500 to promote the president’s policy. She was paid another $20,000 by the Justice Department the following year to write the report “Can Government Strengthen Marriage?” for the National Fatherhood Initiative, a private organization founded by Wade Horn, who became HHS assistant secretary for children and families under Bush.23
Following the disclosure of her government contracts by the Washington Post, Gallagher, whose syndicated column runs in seventy-five newspapers, wrote a column saying she “had no special obligation to disclose this information” but would have done so anyway, “if I had remembered.”24
While news of Gallagher’s government payoff caused Tribune Media Services to drop her column, it did not trouble some media outlets. “This is what we hired Maggie to write about,” said Kathie Kerr, spokeswoman for United Press Syndicate, which continues to distribute Gallagher’s column. “It probably wouldn’t have changed our mind to distribute it.” National Review editor Rich Lowry said, “We would have preferred that she told us, and we would have disclosed it in her bio.”25
Leaving nothing to chance, the Bush regime also paid off conservative columnist Mike McManus. As Salon.com revealed, McManus, founder of the group Marriage Savers and author of a syndicated column called “Ethics and Religion” that ran in more than fifty newspapers, received $10,000 from HHS to train marriage counselors as part of the agency’s marriage promotion initiative.26 The revelation came a day after Bush ordered a stop to hiring commentators to promote administration initiatives.
These were merely the high-profile cases. The Bush administration’s covert propaganda campaign has been pervasive. An Education Department investigation in 2005 revealed that at least eleven newspapers had run op-ed pieces written by education advocacy groups that were paid for by the federal government, but never identified their government funding.27
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who demanded the Education Department investigation, declared, “People looking at advertisements or reading their local newspapers would have had no idea that what they were reading was bought and paid for with their tax dollars. No matter which way you slice it, that is propaganda.”28
The corporate media has been in high dudgeon over the fake news scandal. Their leaders professed to being shocked, shocked by the government’s covert propaganda campaign. As the New York Times editorialized, “Only sophisticated viewers would easily recognize that these videos are actually unpaid commercial announcements for the White House or some other part of the government.”29
The Times is right, but the media has only itself to blame for the fact that most people—including TV news managers—can’t distinguish journalism from propaganda. It is because media organizations have reached an all-time low in how they cover the powerful. Instead of confronting those in power, news establishments have acted as an echo chamber. Rather than challenge the fraudulent claims of the Bush administration, we have media that have acted as a conveyor belt for the government’s lies.
Government propaganda would be ludicrously obvious if the media were doing their job as a watchdog of our democracy. Instead, nothing about official feel-good news seems out of the ordinary.
Fake Journalists
In Bush’s alternate reality, there’s no need to persuade reporters to give good press. The Bush administration simply turns to fake journalists to carry its water.
That was the case with Jeff Gannon, who attended White House press conferences as a reporter for an outfit called Talon News/GOPUSA. At a rare presidential press conference in the White House in January 2005 (during his first term Bush held fifteen solo news conferences, fewer than any president since records were kept30), Bush was getting hounded by reporters over the Armstrong Williams scandal. For a lifeline, he called on the guy in the fourth row with the shaved head. Gannon stood up and lobbed the president a softball question: “Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock solid, and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work—you said you’re going to reach out to these people—how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”
At least Gannon had the part right about being divorced from reality. Turns out this “journalist” was in fact one James Guckert, a male escort, webmaster of gay porn sites (including Hotmilitary stud.com and Militaryescorts4m.com), and the rising star for a faux news Web site sponsored by Texas Republican activist Bobby Eberle.31
Guckert was the perfect complement to the Bush administration’s world of fake news and covert propaganda. Now they had their own puppet reporter to turn to for Republican good news when real reporters strayed off message.
The White House has yet to fully explain how Guckert obtained White House press credentials before he published his first article, or why he was allowed access to the White House 196 times since 2003.
Other journalists, such as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, haven’t been as fortunate. “I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the ‘Barberini Faun’ [a nude male statue] is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?” Dowd wrote.
She added, “At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I’d been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he’d renew the pass— after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.”32
Then there is the case of Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps. Thomas has covered every president since Kennedy and has worked in journalism since 1943. She has long occupied a seat in the front row at presidential press conferences— until 2003, when she was unceremoniously moved farther back. “They don’t like me,” she explained about why the Bush administration has tried to banish her. “I ask too [many] mean questions.”33
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, in her syndicated column, questioned why Thomas even had press credentials: “Press passes can’t be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president.”34
It wasn’t just Thomas’s Syrian heritage that angered Coulter, but her insistence on demanding actual answers. Here is an exchange between Thomas and White House press spokesperson Ari Fleischer on January 6, 2003:
HELEN THOMAS: Ari, you said that the president deplored the taking of innocent lives. Does that apply to all innocent lives in the world? And I have a follow-up.
ARI FLEISCHER: I refer specifically to a horrible terrorist attack on Tel Aviv that killed scores and wounded hundreds. And the president, as he said in his statement yesterday, deplores in the strongest terms the taking of those lives and the wounding of those people, innocents in Israel.
THOMAS: My follow-up is, why does he want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis? fleischer: Helen, the question is how to protect Americans, and our allies and friends— thomas: They’re not attacking you.
FLEISCHER: —from a country—
THOMAS: Have they laid a glove on you or on the United States, the Iraqis, in eleven years?
FLEISCHER: I guess you have forgotten about the Americans who were killed in the first Gulf War as a result of Saddam Hussein’s aggression then.
THOMAS: Is this revenge, eleven years of revenge?
FLEISCHER: Helen, I think you know very well that the president’s position is that he wants to avert war, and that the president has asked the United Nations to go into Iraq to help with the purpose of averting war.
THOMAS: Would the president attack innocent Iraqi lives?
FLEISCHER: The president wants to make certain that he can defend our country, defend our interests, defend the region, and make certain that American lives are not lost.
THOMAS: And he thinks they are a threat to us?
FLEISCHER: There is no question that the president thinks that Iraq is a threat to the United States.
THOMAS: The Iraqi people?
FLEISCHER: The Iraqi people are represented by their government.
If there was regime change, the Iraqi—
THOMAS: So they will be vulnerable?
FLEISCHER: Actually, the president has made it very clear that he has no dispute with the people of Iraq. That’s why the American policy remains a policy of regime change. There is no question the people of Iraq—
THOMAS: That’s a decision for them to make, isn’t it? It’s their country.
FLEISCHER: Helen, if you think that the people of Iraq are in a position to dictate who their dictator is, I don’t think that has been what history has shown.
THOMAS: I think many countries don’t have—people don’t have the decision—including us.35
White House officials have never revoked Thomas’s press badge, but they have silenced her in another way: She is no longer called on to ask questions. On March 21, 2006, President Bush finally called on her—for the first time in three years. Thomas picked up right where she left off, asking the president: “Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?”
In a testy exchange, a flustered Bush shot back, “In all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist . . . I didn’t want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen.”
Then there is Russell Mokhiber, editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter. He frequently attends the White House press briefings but is seldom given a chance to ask questions. (Like Thomas, Mokhiber is Arab-American.) But he has been involved in some of the more memorable exchanges with White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, such as this one from September 2, 2003:
RUSSELL MOKHIBER: Scott, two things. First, does the president know how many people have been killed and wounded in Iraq since the beginning of the war?
SCOTT MCCLELLAN: Those numbers are made available, publicly.
MOKHIBER: Does the president know how many—
MCCLELLAN: He’s very well aware of the sacrifices that are made in Iraq.
MOKHIBER: Well, how many—how many people have been killed in Iraq? Not just Americans—total people killed and wounded in Iraq since the beginning of the war?
MCCLELLAN: . . . I don’t know that you can keep track of all the numbers. I mean those are issues you need to address to the Coalition Provisional Authority . . .
MOKHIBER: Does the president know how many people have been killed—
MCCLELLAN: The president knows that what we are doing in Iraq is central to winning the war on terrorism.
MOKHIBER: That wasn’t my question.
MCCLELLAN: It is central—
MOKHIBER: Does he know how many people have been killed and wounded?
MCCLELLAN: It is central to bringing about—
MOKHIBER: I know that. But does he know how many—
MCCLELLAN: —a more peaceful and more secure—
MOKHIBER: —have been killed and wounded.
MCCLELLAN: —which means a safer world.
MOKHIBER: That’s not the question, Scott. The question I had was, does the president know how many—
MCCLELLAN: Again, I’ve answered the question. I told you he’s well aware of the sacrifices that our troops have made and the sacrifices that their families are making with our troops over there in Iraq.36
Throughout the Iraq War, Mokhiber has had difficulty getting press access to the White House. At one point he even had a lawyer call to threaten the White House press office. But he did make it back in on February 1, 2005:
MOKHIBER: Scott, last night in an amicus brief filed before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justice Department came down in favor of displaying the Ten Commandments at courthouses and state houses around the country. My question is: Does the president believe in commandment number six, “Thou shalt not kill,” as it applies to the U.S. invasion of Iraq?
MCCLELLAN: Go ahead. Next question.37
An Army of Cheerleaders
Cocooned in his virtual fantasyland of fake journalists, counterfeit news, and hired hacks, you’d think President Bush could rest secure in the knowledge that he was getting his message across. But an image-obsessed leader can never be too careful.
In October 2005, President Bush held what the White House billed as an impromptu conversation with the troops. The nationally televised videoconference came a few days before Iraqis were to vote on a new constitution. “This is an important time,” Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said to the soldiers before Bush appeared on screen. “The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you.”38
This was to be a freewheeling discussion—with the soldiers saying exactly what they were told to say.
Barber proceeded to coach the ten handpicked U.S. soldiers from the Army’s 42nd Infantry and one Iraqi in their answers. She stood at the White House podium where Bush would later stand, read part of his opening remarks, and then outlined the questions Bush would ask. At times, she suggested phrasing for the soldiers’ responses. With all hell breaking loose in the cities of Iraq, the White House clearly wanted this event to give the impression that the U.S. plan in Iraq was moving ahead just as Bush intended.
The videoconference was set in Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, which Bush lightly acknowledged he could not safely visit. Interestingly, Tikrit was the backdrop for many of Saddam Hussein’s propaganda videos.
During the brief videoconference, the soldiers appeared to fawn over the president. At one point, one told him, “We began our fight against terrorism in the wake of 9/11, and we’re proud to continue it here.” But a telling moment came when Bush asked the soldiers to comment about their interactions with Iraqi civilians. Captain David Williams could cite only a secondhand account: “Sir, I was with my Iraqi counterpart in the city of Tikrit last week, and he was going around talking to the locals. And from what he told me that the locals told him, the Iraqi people are ready and eager to vote in this referendum.”
There was one Iraqi present for the videoconference, Sgt. Maj. Akeel Shaker Nassir, who was in charge of the Iraqi army training facility in Tikrit. His contribution was brief, but gushing: “Thank you very much for everything. I like you.”
When it emerged that the event was staged, reporters grilled White House spokesperson Scott McClellan about the coaching:
SCOTT MCCLELLAN: I’m sorry, are you suggesting that what our troops were saying was not sincere, or what they said was not their own thoughts?
REPORTER: Nothing at all. I’m just asking why it was necessary to coach them.
MCCLELLAN: Well, in terms of the event earlier today, the event was set up to highlight an important milestone in Iraq’s history, and to give the president an opportunity to, once again, express our appreciation for all that our troops are doing when it comes to defending freedom, and their courage and their sacrifice.39
The news story about the event in the Washington Post described it as “one of the stranger and most awkwardly staged publicity events of the Bush presidency.”40
President Bush could only be baffled by the flap. He actually thought he was making news—just like always.
The Bush administration’s covert propaganda programs have had their intended effect: The public is woefully confused. Karl Rove and George Bush must have been delighted to learn that as late as December 2005, a Harris poll revealed that American adults still believed in the following discredited justifications for invading Iraq:
The one hopeful sign is that far fewer people believe in these hoaxes than they once did: Just ten months earlier, twice as many people in the Harris Poll believed Saddam Hussein was involved in planning 9/11.
Among America’s soldiers, the confusion is even greater: According to a first-ever poll of U.S. troops in February 2006, nearly nine of every ten said the U.S. mission is “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” while 77 percent said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”42
Americans believe these lies not because they are stupid, but because they are good media consumers. They trust the media to report without fear or favor and act as good-faith referees of democracy. Sadly, this trust is often betrayed.
We need media in this country that are fiercely independent, that ask the hard questions and hold those in power accountable. Only then will government propaganda be seen for what it is, and citizens can begin making choices informed by reality, not self-serving misinformation. Anything less is a disservice to the servicemen and -women of this country, and a disservice to a democratic society.