THIS MODERN WORLD

Thanks for the link to the NYT atricle on the Bush administration’s propaganda machine.

One sentence caught my eye:

“The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them.”

Can this really be true? Are major networks receiving payments from the government for running gov’t propaganda? This makes the Armstrong Williams case look like small potatoes.

I read the article through to the end, but found no further mention of these payments. Maybe you and other liberal bloggers can pick up where the Times left off.

There really are a lot of unanswered questions here. Primary among them being, what are these news outlets thinking? I know that corporate puff pieces posing as news segments have been picked up by cash-strapped stations for years as an easy way to fill out the time — I’d guess by news managers who think, hey, what’s the harm in a fun little piece this wacky new trend and/or product? Don’t get me wrong, I find that hugely objectionable — I’m pretty sure I remember doing a cartoon or two about it at some point during the nineties — but running government propaganda disguised as news takes it to an entirely different level of deceit. And if the networks really are complicit in this — and kudos to the sharp-eyed reader who caught the reference above — that’s a hell of a lot worse than Dan Rather getting scammed by someone cough cough Karl Rove cough cough on that memogate silliness.

Somebody at some level in the broadcast news industry owes us an explanation. Because the government can churn these things out until they’re blue in the face, but if newscasters don’t run them, then they are relegated to the status of trees falling in an empty forest.

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 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 acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.

Much more.

(Larger photo here.)

…these are the prototypes — the final pieces will be fully painted, like the Christmas ornaments.

Roy directs us to a blogger who wonders, apparently in all seriousness, why passage of the bankruptcy bill appears inevitable despite the opposition of all-powerful bloggers.

I’ve noticed that the premature triumphalists of the right have lately adopted the phrase “Arab Spring.” I assume this is a reference to the “Prague Spring” of 1968 — the brief period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia which, as you may recall, was brutally supressed in August of that same year.

Small suggestion to my friends on the right: if you’re going to come up with a clever nickname for your triumphalist fantasies, you might want it to refer to, you know, an actual triumph.