With all this wingnut OUTRAGE over the Obama administration's supposed "war" on Faux News, I think it's time we had a little flashback to the types of things G.W. Bush did to get the media on it's side. John Cole has provided some examples on his blog. In this diary, I will point out the various things the Bush administration did to try and manipulate the reporting of news in this country during its term in office and provide reliable citations to back them up.
Faking the News: From 2003 through 2005, the Bush administration spent $1.6 billion on "343 contracts with public relations firms, advertising agencies, media organizations and individuals." The program fed TV stations prepackaged video news stories that expressed support for administration policies. The GAO claimed that the practice essentially amounted to "covert propaganda."[Washington Post, 14 Feb. 2006]
Pundit Payoff: Right-wing commentators such as Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus received hundreds of thousands of tax-dollars to tout the administration's various initiatives. Armstrong Williams alone received about $240,000 in order to promote the No Child Left Behind law. Rep. George Miller, who was the ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the Workforce at the time the payments were revealed, labeled the scheme a "potentially criminal mismanagement of expensive contracts." [The Nation, 21 Apr. 2005] Rep. George Miller later revealed the Bush administration's role in blocking IG Jack Higgins from investigating the scandal by shielding former and then-current administration officials from being interviewed. [USA Today, 14 Apr. 2005]
Planting of a Friendly 'Journalist': Fake journalist James Guckert (aka Jeff Gannon), who worked for a shell organization named Talon News Service, was allowed to ask soft-ball questions at official White House press conferences in order to make the administration look good. According Eric Alterman, Press Secretary Scott McClellan "would often call on Gannon when he wanted to extricate himself from a particularly effective line of questioning." [The Nation, 21 Apr. 2005]
Declaring War on NBC: White House senior strategist Ed Gillespie personally sent a letter to NBC News President Steve Capus in order to protest the way NBC was covering administration policies. White House press secretary Dana Perino soon after defended the letter, saying that "we had gotten fed up with the way that the President’s policies [were] being mischaracterized." Fox News, it should be noted, was more than willing to take part in the White House-coordinated campaign against a major news network back then.
FEMA's mock news conference: On 23 Oct. 2006, FEMA held a fake press conference in which they took fake questions from fake journalists about the very real wildfires that were taking place in California. As Time magazine [28 Oct. 2006] explained at the time:
Real reporters were notified only 15 minutes in advance, so all they could reasonably do was call in to a conference line. But the line was set to "listen-only" mode, so asking questions was out of the question. Only the people there — a group consisting almost entirely of FEMA public affairs employees — could grill FEMA representatives.
and last but not least...
Pentagon Sock-Puppetry: The US Department of Defense under the Bush administration coordinated a media propaganda campaign with retired generals who went on major news TV and radio networks and presented themselves as objective "military analysts" with no current connections with the Pentagon. Many of them had ties to defense contractors and stood to benefit financially from the policies they either promoted or defended. Despite this, they never disclosed their massive conflicts of interest. The New York Times [20 Apr. 2008] talked to a few former analysts who experessed regret for taking part in the propaganda exercise:
"It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ " Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.
Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. "This was a coherent, active policy," he said.
As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.
"Night and day," Mr. Allard said, "I felt we’d been hosed."
If anyone else has any more examples with sufficient documentation, please post them in the comments.