PREPACKAGED NEWS GETS GAO REBUKE

Walker: PR Must Be Clearly Labeled

The Government Accountability Office warned federal departments last week
against using a popular public relations tool that already has landed two
agencies in hot water for breaking federal anti-propaganda laws.

In a Feb. 17 memo, Comptroller General David M. Walker reminded department
and agency heads that prepackaged news stories that do not identify the
government as their source violate provisions in annual appropriations laws
that ban covert propaganda.

"It is not enough that the contents of an agency's communication may be
unobjectionable," Walker wrote. "Neither is it enough for an agency to
identify itself to the broadcasting organization as the source of the
prepackaged news story."

Prepackaged news stories, sometimes known as video news releases, have
become an increasingly common public relations tool among government
agencies and in industry. They are designed to resemble broadcast news
stories, complete with narrators who can be easily mistaken for reporters
and suggested introductory language for TV anchors to read. Some news
organizations have run them without changes and without identifying them as
government-produced.

Within the last year, the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, has
rapped the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Department of
Health and Human Services for distributing prepackaged news stories that do
not disclose within the story that the government is the source of the
material.

"[T]elevision-viewing audiences did not know that stories they watched on
television news programs about the government were, in fact, prepared by
the government," Walker wrote. "We concluded that those prepackaged news
stories violated the publicity or propaganda prohibition."

Walker noted that agencies may legally distribute prepackaged stories "so
long as there is clear disclosure to the television viewing audience" that
the material was prepared by the government or its contractors.

"Agency officials should scrutinize any proposed prepackaged news stories
to ensure appropriate disclosures," he wrote, adding that GAO officials
were available to answer questions in particular cases.

Last month, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House
Committee on Government Reform, said the GAO was wrong in ruling against
the drug control office because the agency's mission is to produce media
campaigns to prevent and reduce drug abuse. Davis and Rep. Mark Edward
Souder (R-Ind.) sent Walker a letter urging him to withdraw the ruling and
reconsider the law. They wrote that it was the news organizations, not the
agency, that had a duty to disclose the source of the video news release.

Walker declined to overturn the ruling in a Feb. 15 letter. He wrote that
the drug control office was bound by the disclosure requirement and that
appropriations laws govern the behavior of federal agencies, not of
independent news organizations.