TWO BOUGHT JOURNALISTS AND A RINGER

First we learned that columnist/television host Armstrong Williams had been paid $ 240,000 by t he Department of Education to generate favor5able publicity for Bush’s No Child Left Behind Program. Then it was revalued that $41,500 in tax money was also used to pay columnist Maggie Gallagher to sell Bush’s sexual abstinence program. Now we find that the Department of Health and Human Services paid columnist Michael McManus $10,000 to promote the abstinence program.

The media’s talking heads framed these three stories in the context of journalistic ethics. The use of federal tax funds to promote the president’s campaign for reelection did not come up. Appropriations bills frequently include clauses forbidding the spending of money for any kind of government propaganda.No effort was made to relate these three stories to the huge amounts the Pentagon spent on distributing bogus news story clips to TV stations or the money spent to sell the Medicare prescription drug program on television.

Even the Department of Health and Human Services sent out fake TV news stories on Bush Medicare with an "out cue" saying, "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting." Of course, the story about $100 million being paid to the Ketchum public relations firm to devise strategies to best advertize Bush programs with federal funds almost never came up. That vast sum was part of the $250,000,000 the Bush administration spent on PR.

Once the debate erupted over Social Security "reform," the Social Security Administration mailed recipients a booklet telling them that the system was in deep trouble and must be changed. Five years before, it distributed a booklet entitled "The Future of Social Security: Will Social Security be there for you? Absolutely."Clinton spent about half as much as Bush the Younger on PR, but the difference was that the Clinton PR was aimed at getting people to avoid illnesses and eat healthy. Moreover, the Clinton era ads were clearly labelled as being sponsored by the government, but the Bush pieces do not reveal this. Most of the Bush spending was calculated to yield political advantage. The comptroller general ruled that it was illegal to distribute "video news releases" to media outlets, but the Justice Department quickly overruled him.

To link these stories or even question whether what the government did was proper could be seen as biased reporting, so the media exercised self- censorship.A smaller exercise of self-censorship involved the handling of the revelation that a White House press pass had been issued to Jeff Gannon, actually James Guckert, who had very little experience in journalism. Gannon/Guckert did news reports for several internet sites including Talon News, which is linked to some of George.W. Bush's Texas backers. He also wrote anti-gay material for a domain name called "hotmilitarystud." Though unable to obtain Congressional press credentials, he had a White House press pass for almost two years, and even pitched fawning, soft-ball questions to Bush. He continually did the same with White House press secretary Scott McClellan, sometimes inventing statement by Democrats. He had even been permitted to see secret documents revealing that Valerie Plame was a CIA covert operative. The talking heads rarely mentioned his inventions or soft ball questions or his claim to having seen confidential material on Plame. The focus was on how such a mistake could have been made, and some had to poor taste bring up some unrelated matters about his background. MSNBC briefly showed interest in the story, calling it "Gannongate."His departure from the White House press converences does not mean Scott McClellan will face many more tough questions. Hedrik Hertzberg, has written in the New Yorker that "Softball is often the name of the game at the White House press converences, and it is not uncommon for a correspondent to serve up an intentional walk."

Again, telling the whole story or trying to place events in an understandable context could be seem as displaying liberal bias, so self-censorship was again the rule. Maureen Dowd noted that not even "the Nixon White House [did] anything this creepy." Taken together, these stories suggest there is "an attempt to reinvent" the press.

In the second and third weeks of June, Republican talk AM radio made it clear what kind of press was desired-- one that would not report inconvenient facts. Those who reported on any turture or abuse in detention centers had their patriotism questioned.Here and there, a few journalists try to see the whole story, but their work is met with cries about the media's so-called liberal bias and unfairness. Bill Moyers, formerly of PBS, noted that the objection was not so much to his outlook as to the the fact that "I'm doing journalism that isn't determined by the establishment. You don't get rewarded in commercial broadcasting for trying to tell the truth about institutions of power in the country."

AMERICA'S NEUTERED PRESS

Through intimidation, playing favorites, withholding routine information, excessive use of secrecy, formidable deceptions, and endless complaints about the so-called "liberal media bias," the Bush administration has succeeded in reducing the mainstream press to a largely stenographic role, that of simply putting out the Bush administration line. Bush media advisor Karen Hughes rightly observed that "We don’t see there being any penalty from the voteres for ignoring the mainstream press." Under the second Bush, the press has been forced to largely forfeit its role as critic and source of alternative information. Journalism students are taught that the press has the First Amendment role of holding those in power accountable, but the function is only inform. Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card has denied that the mainstream press has a check and balance function. Without it, democracy will not function very well, but it will be easier for the Right to govern.

By the end of George W. Bush’s third year in the White House, Harpers’ Magazine publisher Rick MacArthur told a radio interviewer that the "White House press corps...has now turned into ...[a] full time press agency for the President of the United States." Later in the interview he added that the public should "assume that the press is now part of the government." On reflection, Mac Arthur would certainly back off from full meaning of these assessments, but he was correct in noting that the national press had lost its ability to critically cover this GOP administration.

The Bush administration had shown enormous skill in information management. It insists upon enforcing the Pentagon’s 1991 ban on taking photographs of coffins carrying the bodies of American soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. When the President held a huge rally for troops at Fort Carson, the press was ordered not to talk to any soldiers before, during, or after the rally. They obeyed, and only the Rocky Mountain News reported on the orders given to t he press. 1
The skill of the Bush administration in manipulating the press was demonstrted in 2004, when the Social Security Administrtion ran many advertisements clearly touting the advantages of Bush’s prescription care plan.

Few noticed that the advertisements could have a political effect. Later that year, the Department of Education, paid $700,000 to an agency to advertise Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a major Bush bragging point. A public relations firm was also paid to rank and evaluate media outletes and reporters on whether they were favorable to this legislation. For some, this seemed like the enemies list Charles Colson created for Richard M. Mixon. The department also paid TV talk show host Armstrong Williams $240,000 to talk up the program in the black community. When the payment came to light, what little discussion there was about blurring the lines between a journalist and an paid advocate.

The federal government paid Maggie Gallagher $21,500 to promote the Bush approach to marriage, and another conservative columnist was paid $10,000 to do the same. The use of taxpayer money for political purposes was nearly a non-issue.

Even abuses of the White House press secretary’s briefings did not cause a great uproar. Minor conservative journalist Jeff Gannon–his real name was Guckert– was issued temporary passes to attend press conferences. Gannon once broke the story that John Kerry could become the first gay president. Scott Mc Clellan seemed to call on Gannon when he was in a spot and Gannon would get him off the hook, sometimes by manufacturing quotations from leading Dcemocrats. Gannon claimed to be one of the reporters who broke the story that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent, and he was the only one to see a confidential CIA document revealing her identity. In 2005, President Bush began pushing his plan to privatize Social Security, and Social Security Administration employees protested that their Administration had been forced to twist the facts about the systems solvency in order to generate support for the personal retirement accounts.

Writing in November, 2003, Russell Baker referred to "the curiously polite treatment President Bush was receiving from most of the mainstream media." James Warren, Washington bureau chief of the Republican Chicago Tribune claimed the press was so busy "sucking up to Bush" that "We have been effectively emasculated...." Columnist Anna Quindlen noted that Bush enjoyed " a Teflon coating slicker and thicker that that of Ronald Reagan." Even after turning a budget surplus into a huge deficit, failure to find Ossama bin Laden and Saddam and Saddam Hussein, and admitting that there was no evidence to connect Iraq with the 9/11 attack on America, Bush enjoyed gentle treatment from the press. Quindlen asked, "imagine what the response from Republicans—and reporters—would have been if Bill Clinton had been responsible for one of those things…."

Manipulating the American Press

The mainstream American press is certainly not an adjunct to the Republican party, but its inclination to handle Republicans with kid gloves has contributed to the GOP’s progress toward becoming the majority party. For three decades, conservatives have complained about an alleged liberal bias in the media, and these complaints have induced some degree of self-censorship. Public Broadcasting, which has long been denounced by conservatives for its liberal bias, has moved to the right 1993 to 2003. FAIR studies found its reporting has a slight Republican edge in 1993 and was conservative in 2003.

The Bush administration hastened public broadcasting’s march to the right by installing Kenneth Tomlinson ceo the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tomlinson had many complaints about the liberal bias of public broadcasting and quickly hired conservative consultant to monitor the political content of Bill Moyer’s "Now", which soon went off the air. He also spent millions to bring The Wall Street Journal Report to PBS. The show featured the far right commentaries of the editorial board. Tomlinson also established an office of ombudsman, headed by Mary Catherine Andrews, who had worked in the Bush White House. She was assisted by two other Republicans, William Schultz and Ken Bode.It is unclear what the function of the office might be, but some fear it will continue the task of monitoring broadcasts to detect alleged liberal bias.

By 2003, the self-censorship had even extended to entertainment programs. Part of what was occurring was an effort to adjust to market bias, or not provide information that would upset large numbers of readers or viewers. Most often this is done by under reporting stories that would unsettle viewers. When CBS invested $16,000,000 in a miniseries on Ronald Reagan, angry conservatives complained that it contained criticisms of the 40th president and CBS obligingly cancelled the series. Media analyst Robert Bianco observed that this "should put to rest the idea that the media are liberal." A conservative Naples, Florida columnist noted the cancellation was not censorship because the government was not involved. "It was not a free speech issue," he added. "If CBS felt pressure, it was free market pressure." Later, CBS refused to aid commercials that criticized George W. Bush on its Super Bowl broadcast, but it accepted Republican advertisements. When the Ronald Reagan died in June, 2004, the press and electronic media spent a week praising him as a great president, glossing ovr his failures, and giving him much more than the benefit of the doubt in debatable matters. Perhaps the press was trying to show that it did not have a liberal bias and/or it anticipated the storm that would have occurred had it covered Reagan’s career honestly. Even conservative Kathleen Parker wondered why reporters could not have found "some middle ground between speaking ill of the dead and intellectual honesty."