DOMESTIC PROPAGANDA MUST BE BANNED

Phony News Stories Deceive Public

Before cheap cartoons took over the time slot, kids growing up in the
1950s and '60s would rise early on a Saturday morning and plant
themselves in front of the TV to catch "Roy Rogers" and "The Lone Ranger."

Some became so over-eager, however, that they could find they'd risen
so early there was nothing beaming down on their bowl of Cheerios from
the blue cathode ray tube but the Indian chief in the test pattern (TV
stations didn't broadcast 24 hours, back then), followed by "Industry
on Parade" and "The Big Picture."

These were 30-minute propaganda reels of often endearing goofiness,
distributed free to local network affiliates by some Steel Ball
Bearing Council and -- in the case of "The Big Picture" -- by the U.S.
Army.

Some general at a desk would get things rolling with a few inspiring
words, followed by a half hour of filmed tank maneuvers or whatever,
celebrating America's "guardians of freedom." Pretty harmless stuff,
especially because it didn't pretend to be anything but what it was.

But even way back then, Congress was careful, when it authorized
expenditures for propaganda broadcasts overseas ("Radio Free Europe"
and the like), to specify no federal agency was authorized to
propagandize Americans with "the government line," here at home. After
all, only characters like Joseph Goebbels did that kind of thing.
America had an independent press.

Guess what? It was revealed this year that the federal Department of
Education -- under whose tenure the cost of government schooling in
this country has skyrocketed while outcomes have flatlined -- paid
conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to promote Mr. Bush's pet
"No Child Left Behind" law.

Additionally, within the past year, the Government Accountability
Office rapped the Department of Health and Human Services and the
Office of National Drug Control Policy for distributing stories about
the Medicare drug benefit and the administration's anti-drug campaign
(respectively), pre-packaged to look like independent new stories, in
the hope and expectation local TV stations would run them without
properly acknowledging them as government propaganda.

(Our drug czars have actually done something trickier than that,
arranging for networks to benefit financially if they'd merely "work
messages" that favor the current selective War Against Some Plant
Extracts into the story lines of their entertainment programs.)

Comptroller General David Walker of the GAO ruled on Feb. 17 it is
illegal -- because it violates provisions in annual appropriations
laws that ban covert propaganda -- for federal agencies to feed TV
stations prepackaged news stories designed to resemble independently
reported broadcast news stories so that TV stations can run them
without editing (and presumably without disclosing the government's
role in producing them.)

But The New York Times reported March 13 that the Bush administration
on March 11 sent memos to federal agency heads and general counsels
"rejecting" that ruling.

Joshua Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and
Steven Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general at the
Justice Department, wrote in the memos that the department's Office of
Legal Counsel, not the GAO (the investigative arm of Congress)
provides binding legal interpretations for federal agencies to follow.

Say again? It's the executive branch that now decides what the law is,
and not the Congress?

The legal counsel's office "does not agree with GAO that the covert
propaganda prohibition applies simply because an agency's role in
producing and disseminating information is undisclosed or 'covert'
." Mr. Bradbury wrote. "Our view is that the prohibition does not
apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and
therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information
concerning the programs administered by an agency."

"No particular viewpoint"? This is palpable nonsense. Are we to
believe Armstrong Williams would have received his government payola
if he'd told his audience that "No Child Left Behind" simply wastes
everyone's time "teaching to the test" -- that the best solution would
be to shut down the Department of Education and return educational
control to our local communities? That Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey and
his successors would have been happy to compensate the producers of
episodes of "Law & Order" that presented the viewpoint that marijuana
is relatively harmless, that armed drug busts kill more people than
they "save"?

Have we just forgotten to take our idiot pills this week?

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said through a spokesman March 14 he
will try to attach language to an appropriations bill to clarify that
taxpayer money cannot be spent on such productions.

"Whether in the form of a payment to an actual journalist, or through
the creation of a fake one, it is wrong to deceive the public with the
creation of phony news stories," wrote Sen. Lautenberg and fellow Sen.
Ted Kennedy, D-Fort Lauderdale.

The Democrats are on the right track, as will happen occasionally. But
they need to go much further.

Federal agencies (of which there should be many fewer, by the by)
should have "public relations" and "media" departments only for the
purpose of answering questions and helping citizens understand the
rules and regulations they enforce. Promoting policies that fill their
own feeding troughs (especially by stealth) should be rigorously
barred, violations punishable by individual imprisonment.