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."