A congressional watchdog agency has ruled that payments to a conservative commentator to promote the president’s education agenda were illegal “covert propaganda.”
The Government Accountability Office also said the Bush administration broke the law by hiring a public relations company to look for favorable media mentions of the Republican Party. “Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds,” the GAO said.
And the independent, nonpartisan agency took exception to prepackaged “video news releases” produced by a couple of Cabinet agencies.
These weren’t isolated instances. In several cases this year the Bush administration stretched ethical boundaries in an effort to get favorable news coverage for its programs.
But some of the blame also has to go to the news organizations that used this stuff without saying where it came from.
Clearly, it was wrong for Armstrong Williams to accept $186,000 for churning out columns and television commentary praising President Bush’s No Child Left Behind education policy.
The GAO said it wasn’t illegal for another Cabinet agency to sign a $21,500 contract with columnist Maggie Gallagher to work on the administration’s marriage initiative.
Maybe it wasn’t illegal, but it was unethical by the test any professional journalist would apply. You don’t write about organizations in which you have a personal stake – and it’s just plain wrong to accept money for favorable coverage.
The congressional auditors also found a previously unreported case in which the Education Department commissioned a newspaper article praising the department’s science education efforts. The story, printed primarily in smaller newspapers, didn’t mention the department’s role in its production.
That important detail also was omitted from some “video news releases” the agency found fault with.
One of those prepackaged “news reports” said the president’s program to help students keep up with their classmates “gets an A-plus.” Two others, produced last year, praised the administration’s Medicare drug program. They all ended this way: “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.” They didn’t say the “reporting” was paid for by the agencies being “reported” on.
The GAO found that the stories were “purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual. The essential fact of attribution is missing.”
It seemed to surprise reporters in New York and Washington that this sort of devious self-promotion was going on. But in smaller markets, video news releases and prepackaged reports are hardly cause for astonishment.
You can see it on local TV. The station takes a “feed” from some outside organization and then adds a narrative voiced by one of its own news staff. Sometimes the information is produced by a group whose integrity no one would question – nonprofit providers of health care or consumer information, for instance.
But the point is, the source of the information should be clearly identified. Even public relations practitioners – the ethical ones anyway – insist on that. The Public Relations Society of America says, in an official statement, that “broadcasters and producers of prepackaged news materials are obligated to fully inform the public about who provided the information and who paid for the production.”
So the GAO might also have denounced the public relations operatives who produce misleading “reports” and the stations that broadcast them without identifying the source.
It didn’t, and just as well, given the First Amendment. We don’t want federal agencies telling journalists how to conduct themselves. But the people who provide information to the public also have a duty to be more responsible and transparent.
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and is a co-author of the organization’s ethics code.
