Published on Wednesday, February 22, 2006 by OneWorld.net
Watchdogs Urge Full Probe of Bush Propaganda Spending
by Niko Kyriakou
SAN FRANCISCO - Media reform groups are calling for a deeper investigation of Bush administration advertising and propaganda efforts following the release of a report that concludes the White House has spun a web of public relations (PR) contracts larger than previously thought.
At issue are agreements to produce everything from advertisements to video news releases--government-vetted spots designed to air alongside and to be indistinguishable from regular televised news reports.
Critics of the state-sponsored content said it constitutes part of a broader government attack on press freedom and that it amounts to a subversion of democracy.
''When elected public servants use taxpayer dollars to manipulate or deceive the very people whose consent they require for their legitimacy, our public servants then become our masters,'' said Sanho Tree, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies.
The official Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported last week that government agencies have spent about $1.6 billion over the past 30 months on PR and advertising contracts. Investigators said they found no breach of the law and added that all spent funds came from the agencies' budgets.
The document overlooked considerable government spending to cast President George W. Bush's policies in a favorable light, media reformists said, because it covered neither all types of PR spending nor all federal agencies.
''We need a full accounting of the Bush administration's spending on advertising, PR, and fake news,'' said Craig Aaron of advocacy group Free Press. ''It's time for Congress to reclaim its constitutional role as a counterweight to the executive branch and permanently cut off funding for covert propaganda. We must ensure that taxpayer money isn't being spent by the White House to secretly manipulate the American public.''
The administration's drive to shore up popular support for its self-styled ''war on terror'' and to keep up armed forces recruitment appears to have fuelled the spending, according to Diane Farsetta of the Center for Media and Democracy, publisher of the quarterly PR Watch.
Of the $1.6 billion total outlined in the GAO report, the Pentagon spent $1.1 billion--much of it on recruitment, Farsetta said.
The U.S. Army has failed to meet recruiting targets despite increasing the proportion of those accepted with problems in their background, the Baltimore Sun newspaper reported last week.
In all, 73,000 men and women joined the Army last year, down from 77,000 in 2004, the daily said, adding that the Army reached its recruiting goal in 2004 but fell about 7,000 recruits short last year.
To be sure, there is nothing new or unique about the Bush administration spending money to recruit warriors, said propaganda expert and author Nancy Snow.
''Historically, propaganda has always merged with recruitment because people must first be conditioned to become soldiers and fight strangers in distant lands,'' Snow said. ''It's not a natural condition but must be manipulated to get people to join unpopular realities.''
That kind of spending likely will remain largely hidden and is unlikely to shrink without public pressure for transparency and budget cuts, she said.
''The activities of these groups [contracted companies] should be out in the open, but unless and until the public clamors for hearings on the subject, we'll have to settle for occasional op-eds and white papers that have a short shelf life.''
For its report last week, the GAO surveyed seven of 15 government agencies and relied on self-reported information from them, critics said. The GAO did not mention task orders on existing contracts, subcontracts, or PR work done by government staffers without the use of outside contractors, and failed to investigate those agencies responsible for scandals that initially sparked the investigation, they added.
But the Interior Department, the only one to respond to the report, said the GAO incorrectly flagged a number of legitimate contracts, for example ones covering the production of brochures and exhibits for National Parks.
Congressional Democrats requested the GAO study last year after two scandals emerged.
The first involved several government departments issuing illegal video news releases produced by outside firms to promote department initiatives. The second involved revelations, followed by an official acknowledgement, that the Bush administration had paid journalists Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher to promote administration proposals.
The GAO did not say whether government spending on PR had risen but earlier studies suggest they have.
The U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Government Reform Minority Office, in a report last year, said the Bush administration unloaded twice as much on PR in its first term as did the Clinton administration in its second term, with payments jumping from $128 million to $250 million.
Conservative media watchdog Accuracy in Media faulted the report as based on an incomplete accounting of Clinton PR spending. The GAO would never undertake a more thorough study because the three-year statute of limitations governing such reviews has passed, the group said, adding that the democratic legislators had this fact in mind when they commissioned their study.
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