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Bush's propaganda spiral

In April 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher praised "President Bush's modest marriage initiative" to direct money from welfare programs for "marriage education courses." Given Gallagher's history as a right-leaning writer for Universal Press Syndicate on marriage and family issues, it was a position that made sense.

There was one problem: Gallagher was also working that year for the Department of Health and Human Services as a paid consultant on family issues for the Administration for Children and Families, earning $21,500. And she never told her editors or her readers - until the Washington Post reported this week on the payments.

Noting she was not paid to influence her columns, Gallagher resists comparisons to conservative pundit Armstrong Williams, who is still apologizing weeks after news broke he received $240,000 from the government to tout Bush's No Child Left Behind initiative. But it is hard to believe Gallagher wasn't encouraged to support Bush's family initiatives by the thousands she earned in a relationship she now admits she should have publicly disclosed.

Still, there is a more important concern: the dangerous line the Bush administration has crossed in resorting to covert, and possibly illegal, campaigns to spread propaganda in the press.

Williams and Gallagher are only the latest in a string of examples, including an aborted attempt to force Social Security Administration employees to promote Bush's proposed overhaul of the program. The Government Accounting Office has twice denounced as illegal propaganda the use of government money to create so-called Video News Releases - prerecorded video interviews, footage and scripts - prepared by government offices to push the president's agenda.

Delivered to TV stations nationwide, these news releases are assembled into stories by producers who usually give viewers no warning the material has had little or no vetting by the broadcaster.

President Bush on Wednesday commanded his Cabinet secretaries not to hire columnists to promote their agendas, his strongest statement yet on the issue. But it is not enough.

The public is entitled to full disclosure; a complete list of all supposedly independent columnists, pundits and journalists who may have received government money to tout Bush initiatives. The president also would be better served if his administration adjusted its approach to the media - from ending his staff's tight control on information within the White House to squelching active campaigns that spread lies to journalists.

This issue surfaced two years ago, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was forced to shut down the Office of Strategic Influence, a department cobbled together to feed misleading and sometimes false news stories to foreign journalists in a clumsy attempt to shape world opinion. When the idea of the government deliberately lying to foreign journalists provoked an outcry, officials simply transferred elements of the program throughout the Pentagon, according to the Los Angeles Times - telling CNN in October, for example, that an offensive in Fallujah began three weeks earlier than it did.

Every modern president has tried to manipulate the media. But by lying to journalists and buying favorable coverage, the Bush administration is secretly undermining the press' credibility - with help from lazy media outlets, which have become unconscionable partners in the administration's agitprop.

Such tactics bring multiple problems. When undetected, they prompt distorted, or dishonest, proadministration coverage; when revealed, they encourage a skeptical public to reject all mainstream media reporting, even stories critical of the administration.

Worse, such efforts show a contempt for one of the cornerstones of modern-day democracy: a free press, untainted by propaganda and undue influence. If the president truly believes his statement Wednesday that there "needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," he must end his administration's attempts to subvert it.

[Last modified January 27, 2005, 00:40:21]