That rising and upstart news organization called the Bush White House is
at it again.
The same folks who paid Armstrong Williams almost a quarter of a million dollars to shill for Bush's education policies is now spoon feeding local news outlets across the country in an effort to drum up support for CAFTA.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has churned out three dozen radio and television news segments since the first of the year that promote a controversial trade agreement with Central America opposed by labor unions, the sugar industry and many members of Congress, including some Republicans.
Amid an intense debate over government-funded efforts to influence news coverage, the prepackaged reports have been widely distributed to broadcast outlets across the country for easy insertion into newscasts.
The USDA has targeted rural broadcasters with agricultural audiences that have a stake in the controversial trade agreement under consideration by Congress. Some, like Iowa Public Television's "Market to Market" are circumspect in their use of the USDA feeds, but other, smaller broadcasters on short budgets are more likely to swallow the spoon feeding, though in some cases at least, there is an attempt to provide a "balance":
Sonja Hillgren of Farm Journal Media said her company's "AgDay" television program uses USDA video packages "when they are well-balanced and very strongly identified as coming from the USDA."
"The USDA does some good work," she said, "and we don't want to ignore that resource."
In the sugar-cane producing state of Louisiana, Don Molino, the farm director for the Louisiana Agri-News Network, said he uses the USDA radio reports about three days a week.
"I use a lot of their stuff verbatim," he said. "Everything I've been able to use has been pretty well balanced as far as I can tell."
On more controversial issues such as CAFTA, Molino said he normally follows up the USDA report with a comment from a Louisiana member of Congress who opposes the trade deal.
Most startling in this report, is the way a top U.S. trade official, Allen Johnson, implicitly threatens our domestic sugar industry for opposing CAFTA, hinting that the industry's subsidies will be at risk as a result of opposing Bush's policies:
"Folks in the rest of the economy and folks in the rest of agriculture and folks that are interested in building relationships with democracies here in our neighborhood begin to look at the sugar industry as an impediment to that progress," he said. "That's not good for them."
More lies and threats. It never ends with these guys.