America - Andrew Stephen reveals how Bush nobbled the press

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Sat, 16 Apr 2005 22:28:34 -0700 (PDT)

America - Andrew Stephen reveals how Bush nobbled the press

 

 

The U.S. " free " press has been undermined for over 30 years till it is

little more than a propaganda machine now.

 

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/200504180023

 

 

 

America - Andrew Stephen reveals how Bush nobbled the press

Andrew Stephen - America

Monday 18th April 2005

 

The new style of government here involves paying journalists and

broadcasters to mention Bush policies favourably and paying PR

companies to plant fake " news reports " . By Andrew Stephen

 

Hillary Clinton, I hear, is so left-wing that she will be unable to

win the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 2008. The UN is in

chaos and Kofi Annan will have to go because it has been proved beyond

doubt that he is corrupt. Senator Ted Kennedy is a beyond-the-pale

lefty who should not be taken seriously in American politics.

 

Virtually every day, I find decent people telling me this sort of

thing. Such pearls have become accepted wisdom in all social classes

and across the political spectrum. In fact, Hillary Clinton's record

fits quite comfortably with the Democratic mainstream. The UN

oil-for-food scandal is nothing compared with that of the disappearing

$4bn during the first weeks of the Iraq occupation, and there is no

evidence whatever that Annan is anything but a man of deep principle.

Kennedy would fit easily into the left of the Tory party.

 

So why do most Americans believe these statements to be true? The

answer, I think, is that the Bush administration has consciously

decided to wrest control of large slices of the American media - not

just in its editorialising, but in its reporting as well. It comes

naturally to the present White House to lie, bully and intimidate, and

the result is that the media are now exactly where the administration

wants them to be: cowed, more right-wing, and on the defensive.

 

The process started in the administration's first term. " Reporters "

without proper press credentials were planted in White House press

conferences; they duly asked what Americans call softball questions.

Fake TV news reports, written and produced by government departments

or even PR companies paid to work on their behalf, were frequently

broadcast by stations that passed them off as their own legitimate news.

 

Take Jeff Gannon, a man with a shaven head who was always asking

contrived questions at White House press conferences. The

administration gave him press credentials almost as soon as it took

power in 2001, at a time when it was turning away many critical

journalists, such as the Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist

Maureen Dowd. Not long ago, Gannon asked President Bush: " How are you

going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from

reality? " He was also given a secret government memo that outed a

woman as a CIA agent - information the administration wanted to leak.

 

Gannon worked for a political website called Talon News, the White

House said. In fact, Talon News was a front organisation; the man

funding Talon was Robert Eberle, a 37-year-old Texas Republican who

also supports a right-wing website called [http://www.gopusa.com (the

letters GOP standing for Grand Old Party, the traditional nickname for

the Republican Party]). Gannon's real name is James D Guckert. Guckert

was the name on the driving licence he presented to the US Secret

Service every day when he arrived at the White House - a clear

indication that the machine was in cahoots with the deception. He was

also behind gay " escort " websites such as

[http://www.hotmilitarystuds.com, http://www.workingboys.com and

http://www.militaryescorts.com, which advertised him as somebody who

is " military, muscular, masculine and discrete ][sic] " .

 

Members of the Bush administration certainly would not want publicly

to be associated with sleaze and fabrication, but such things do not

matter if they are kept under wraps; being found out is what counts.

Guckert subsequently " resigned " as White House correspondent for Talon

News because of the pressure on him and " my family " - apparently a

reference to his elderly mother. Talon News has now disappeared

altogether, and this particular wheeze by the Republicans is over.

 

But others proliferate. I would have thought that the Fox News network

- by far the most-watched news channel in the country - would not need

anyone to serve up propaganda to it for broadcasting. A report by the

Project for Excellence in Journalism said last month that 73 per cent

of Fox news items about Iraq contained the opinions of reporters and

anchors, apparently provided voluntarily. But its stations in

Louisville and Memphis have still broadcast " news reports " that have

been faked by government departments or PR agencies to promote the

Bush agenda - without telling viewers of their origin. Typical are

highly contentious " reports " about the proposed changes in social

security, which end with the convincing sign-off " In Washington, I'm

Karen Ryan reporting " .

 

The reporter in a similar piece, hailing what was described as

" another success " in " the drive to strengthen aviation security " , was

a PR operative working under a false name. Reports highlighting the

training of interrogators such as those at Abu Ghraib Prison were

produced by the Pentagon and transmitted by at least 34 television

stations.

 

The administration paid $254m to PR companies in its first term, $97m

of which went to a public relations firm called Ketchum. This company

was involved in yet another wheeze: secretly paying journalists to

drop favourable mentions of the administration into their writings and

broadcasting. Armstrong Williams, a man the Washington Post described

as " one of the most prominent black conservatives in the media " , was

paid $241,000 to comment on the administration's schools policies

during his broadcasts and in his syndicated columns.

 

The way the administration reacted when news of this came out was,

again, typical: Rod Paige, in charge of education when his department

contracted Williams to spew out support masquerading as honest

comment, pronounced himself shocked and ordered an inquiry into

" perceptions and allegations of ethical lapses " . Not real ethical

lapses, you notice, just perceptions. " This happens all the time, "

Williams says of his paymasters' tactics. " There are others. "

 

Newspapers and TV stations have started to buckle under pressure.

Right-wing administration policies are presented as mainstream; the US

media like to see themselves as occupying the noble middle ground, and

have been coerced to see the middle as further to the right. In the

election campaign last year, for example, George Bush's claims were

far more outrageous than John Kerry's - but the media convinced

themselves that, by seeing each side as equally guilty, their coverage

would be (to use Fox's cynical phrase) fair and balanced. The tactics

of the Bush administration have thus become like those of Richard

Nixon: it uses any opportunity to paint opponents as dirty and

unprincipled, while claiming the high moral ground for itself.

 

Perhaps my favourite indicator of how the president and his team view

the media came in September 2000 when Bush and Dick Cheney were

speaking at an election rally in Naperville, Illinois. Microphones

picked up Bush saying: " There's Adam Clymer, major-league asshole from

the New York Times. " To which Cheney responded: " Oh yeah, he is, big

time. "

 

Which probably explains why the administration then refused a press

pass to Maureen Dowd (but gave one to the wretched Guckert), and why

it banned New York Times reporters from the vice-presidential plane.

Give no quarter, show no quarter, unless it becomes the only political

way out; pay and manipulate for good coverage even though it may be

downright dishonest: that is the new way of government here.