A Snake-Oil President

By Timothy Karr, TomPaine.com. Posted October 17, 2005.

Treating policy as product to be marketed to the electorate is no great stretch for a president who fashions himself the CEO of White House Inc. But in its zeal to promote sales of the Bush brand, this administration has crossed the line that separates honest brokers from snake oil salesmen.

Bush and company sold Americans defective goods in clear violation of federal law. Yet Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hasn't budged. Instead, the man charged with enforcing our laws has tasked his army of lawyers to throw a legal shield around the White House, telling the administration to ignore investigations by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which repeatedly has blasted Team Bush for using taxpayer money to fund "covert propaganda."

In its latest report, issued on Sept. 30, the GAO's federal auditors scolded the White House for squandering American tax dollars to hire fake news reporters and unleash a pre-packaged new blitz in advance of the 2004 elections. The GAO found the White House violated the law by hiring pundit Armstrong Williams to shower praise on Bush's education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, while interviewing administration officials on the air.

The GAO also uncovered a previously undisclosed case in which the Education Department commissioned an article carried by several newspapers that extolled the administration's role in promoting science education. Readers were not informed of the government's role in the writing of the article.

The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 forbids the domestic dissemination of government-authored propaganda or "official news" deliberately designed to influence public opinion or policy. The law singles out materials that serve "a solely partisan purpose." The GAO has now found on at least four separate occasions that administration agencies violated this and other federal restrictions when they disseminated news written by the government or its contractors without disclosing the conflict of interest.

In 2003, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy produced for local newscasts eight "video news releases" that praised Bush's plan for preventing teen drug use. They were beamed into more than 22 million households via nearly 300 local television stations. Around the same time, the Department of Health and Human Services contracted PR industry professional Karen Ryan to pose as a local news reporter giving the administration's Medicare plan "an A-plus." The resulting fake news segment was broadcast by more than 40 local newscasts. In both cases, these video news releases broke the law by not disclosing the government as their source.

It's more than likely that the White House has set other propaganda efforts loose in the media mainstream. We just don't know about them yet. A January report by members of the House Committee on Government Reform noted that this administration has set aside a quarter billion in taxpayer dollars for similar propaganda efforts -- spending money on PR at four times the rate of any previous administration.

Timothy Karr is the author of MediaCitizen, a weblog about the future of America's media. He is the campaign director of Free Press. From September 2003 through February 2005, Karr was executive director of MediaChannel.org and Media for Democracy.

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