March 17, 2005
Fake News
Bush Administration Issues Prepackaged Television News
By Floyd Johnson
It was revealed recently that the Bush administration has been releasing prepackaged television news segments masquerading as legitimate news interviews. According to a recent NY Times report, 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. Many of them were subsequently broadcast on local television stations across the country without any acknowledgement that they were produced by the government. The investigative arm of Congress - the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO) - has condemned many of the releases as "illegal covert propaganda" designed primarily to promote the President's policies and programs.
Not since Goebbels have we seen anything like the methods being used by the Bush administration to manipulate the news and control the media. But no one in the mainstream media will dare draw any analogy to the government take over in Germany in 1933 or they will receive what Sen. Robert Byrd got. Heaps of public scorn and abuse from the shrill propagandists on talk radio and the Fox News Channel - never mind that Sen. Byrd's comments were historically accurate and particularly germane to what is happening today in Washington.
It is time to remind all Americans that Adolf Hitler rose to power "legally" -that he did not seize power, but achieved dictatorial powers by a democratic vote in the German parliament. In 1933, the elected members of the German Reichstag (Parliament) passed an "Enabling Act" - officially labeled the "Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich" - distress, it must be added, that had been created by the ruling National Social Democrat Party (NSDAP) itself. When that act passed, it effectively meant the end of democracy in Germany. Once Hitler had the power, he abused it tragically for 6 million Jews and millions of others.
We in America, of course, must seem a very long way from such an abuse of power, but in fact we have just taken the first step towards such tyranny. We have just witnessed our own Congress pass a similar "enabling" act. Congress relinquished its constitutional responsibility and sole authority to declare war to the President without any end date on that transference of power. As a result, the President may now legally take military action when and where ever he wishes without seeking any further Congressional authorization or support. That was the dangerous first step, and Sen. Byrd warned us about that as well, but there has been no public outcry - no expressions of concern.
What frightens me most today about what happened in 1933 is that ordinary Germans - working men and women, housewives, shopkeepers, etc. - bought the NSDAP party propaganda - hook, line and sinker. I fear that many Americans are also buying and believing much of the propaganda being issued by our government agencies in a similar way. Many Americans are not questioning the sources - they are accepting these "make believe news clips" as fact, and they apparently do not seem to see anything ethically wrong with the method of their delivery.
What I think is missing most today in America is good old fashioned tough investigative reporting in the true traditions of the Fourth Estate that for two centuries has kept our government honest. A media that does not accept propaganda, patently false or evasive answers, or executive secrecy, but digs, asserts itself and then persists. But I fear that the mainstream media today is just too meek, too afraid, too uninterested, or just too commercial.
In ancient Rome, citizens became increasingly addicted to the free distributions of food and the violent gladiatorial contests held in the Coliseum and Circus Maximus. The Roman poet Juvenal (47-130 AD) felt that Romans had lost the capacity to govern themselves when they became distracted by mindless self-gratification. He wrote, the public now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things - "bread and circuses." Today, our mainstream media is giving us circuses - "Desperate Housewives" and "Wife Swap" - shows that make more money than news programming and shows that take people's minds off their eroding positions in our economy and society.
I am not sure how America is going to deal with the problem of deteriorating news coverage. Organizations like Truth in Media can and do reveal the truth about the news, but who reads what they produce? Both the left and right in America are gravitating to the news sources that tell them "what they want to hear." Americans seem to be more than willing to ignore the facts when it suits them - a recent poll revealed, for example, that 57 percent of respondents still believe Iraq was either ''directly involved'' in carrying out the 9/11 attacks or had provided ''substantial support'' to al-Qaeda.
One answer to the problem may be more newspapers. Honest newspapers that understand the importance of their responsibility to society and their role as the fourth member of our democratic system of "checks and balances." Not just large metropolitan dailies that behave as if they are merely the advertising arms of corporate America. I think America would greatly benefit if we had aggressive daily tabloids like the Daily News in London which chases even the hint of political scandal or bureaucratic misdeed and publishes it forthwith. The British press does not rest - it persists until it uncovers the truth. We could use such tabloid journalism in America. We had it once.
We must solve this conundrum in journalism or democracy will surely perish.
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Floyd Johnson describes himself as a depression-born, unreconstructed FDR-Democrat. He moved to Phoenix from London in 1975 after residing several years in Brussels and London. He received a Masters Degree from Thunderbird - The Garvin School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona in 1981. After 35 years in the computer industry, he was a used and rare book seller in Peoria, Arizona until his retirement in 2002.
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