Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

STEVE SEBELIUS: Question authority

I took money to write this column.

The good news is, I took it from the Review-Journal, not from the government or a special interest looking to get its point of view across to the public. The bad news is, not everybody in this profession can say the same.

Witness conservative columnist Armstrong Williams, who, it was reported last week, was paid $240,000 by the U.S. Department of Education to promote the No Child Left Behind Act on his syndicated television show. Williams, who also runs a small public relations agency, agreed to have former Education Secretary Rod Paige on his program to comment on the law.

"It's a fine line," Williams told The Associated Press. "Even though I'm not a journalist, I'm a commentator. I feel I should be held to the media ethics standard. My judgment was not the best. I wouldn't do it again." But when he was first busted by USA Today, Williams had a slightly different take: "I wanted to do it because it was something I believe in."

Where to start? First, Williams is dead wrong: It's not a "fine line." It's a big, bright, conspicuous line, one that he should have known not to cross. "Commentators," including yours truly, are journalists and thus subject to ethics codes. Second, if Williams really believed in No Child Left Behind, he wouldn't have needed to be paid to promote it. He had, after all, access to the media, both print and television. (I say "had" because his syndicate, Tribune Media Services, dropped him as a columnist in the wake of the revelations.)

By now, Williams is starting to get it. "It's important that I have a credible voice and that I'm not perceived as being paid for what I say," he said. "That's my responsibility. I blame no one, I get the message and I will be better."

Very well. But this is a far bigger story than a single columnist who crossed an obvious ethical line. This is a story of a government obsessed with harnessing the supposedly independent media to foist propaganda on an unsuspecting American public.

That's what caught the eye of the Government Accountability Office recently, when researchers cited the Office of National Drug Control Policy for producing and distributing fake news stories about the consequences of young people's drug use. Because the government concealed the fact that it was the author of these "news" segments, they "constitute covert propaganda," according to the GAO.

Perhaps even worse is that an estimated 300 television stations beamed those segments to more than 22 million people without telling them that the government, not their news staff, was the author.

It's not the first time government contractors posing as news reporters have made the air. In May, the GAO objected to a similar program designed to promote the Republican changes to the Medicare prescription drug program. The "video news releases" were sent to 126 television stations. Although the package was labeled as coming from the Department of Health and Human Services, not everybody watching knew that. And the GAO concluded that this, too, was illegal government propaganda. "The entire story package was developed with appropriated funds but appears to be an independent news story," the agency concluded, according to the Los Angeles Times.

And don't forget that in November 2001, President Bush summoned Hollywood's elite to meet with his political director, Karl Rove. The purpose of that meeting, said Daily Variety at the time, was to "hammer out a specific agenda for the entertainment industry to aid the fight on terrorism." Industry leaders pledged they wouldn't become a propaganda organ for the White House, but with the Federal Communications Commission doing pixel-by-pixel analysis of every show looking for indecency, isn't the industry in a position to want to please the government?

Although the Bush White House has turned propaganda into an art form -- how many times have administration officials not-so-subtly hinted that the war in Iraq is somehow connected to the Sept. 11 attacks? -- the GOP was hardly the first. During the waning days of the Clinton administration, we learned about the most egregious example of propaganda to date. In the late 1990s, it seems the Office of National Drug Control Policy had purchased $1 billion in advertising on the nation's airwaves to spread anti-drug propaganda, overtly for once.

When the ad market heated up, network executives were scrambling for ways to get out of the cut-rate government contract and sell time to the highest bidder.

The drug warriors agreed to waive their ad time in exchange for getting government-approved, anti-drug story lines in popular shows such as "ER," "Chicago Hope," "Beverly Hills 90210" and, sadly, "The Drew Carey Show." Several magazines tried submitting anti-drug articles for similar credit.

A good rule of thumb for everybody: Question what you see on television, hear on the radio and read in the newspaper, even in this column. The man is counting on the fact that you won't be thinking for yourself. Prove him wrong.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist. His column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach him at 383-0283 or by e-mail at SSebelius@reviewjournal.com.