Government video reports blur media ethics

[struggle4progress]

Segments don't always include source information
David Barstow, Robin Stein, New York Times
Sunday, March 13, 2005

<snip> "Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public-relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to- serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 different federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgment of the government's role in their production. <snip>

... (In) three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda," even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the GAO 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." <snip>

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/13/MNGFEBOM6D1.DTL

[EVDebs]

1. Great article - mentions www.dvidshub.net for satellite feeds of

military news reports produced by and for the military but available to local tv news shows.

Propaganda especially during wartime was something the networks said they were going to cooperate with the administration on.

Just read through this site and see what MSM has been doing to cooperate
http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle25.html