TV stations have been broadcasting government produced "news" without attribution 


The New York Times reported yesterday that "at least 20 federal agencies [...] have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years [...] Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production." 

The Times said that "records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source."

"There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," Bush told reporters in January, but the Times says that "press officers for several federal agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments." "Last month," according to the Times, "the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports 'that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials'," but the Justice Department told "all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings."

Just because a segment on a news broadcast appears to be by an independent "reporter" working for the station, it is no longer reasonable to assume that that's the case. It may very well be covert government propaganda. 

Posted: Saturday - March 12, 2005 at 11:39 PM          

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