Bush Administration Accused of Manufacturing the News

[Barad Simith]

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2652922

The Bush Administration is being investigated for producing "ready made" television news packages in which actors were paid to pose as journalists, it emerged today.

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The packages were produced by the Department of Health and Human Services, but news viewers would have no way of knowing they were watching a Government-produced story, rather than an independent news report.

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Under law federal money cannot be used for "publicity or propaganda purposes" unless authorised by Congress.

[Colin Ex]

1. Didn't someone make a movie about that?

I might be wrong.

[eleonora]

2. this is making me SICK!

uuuuugh...

[Barad Simith]

4. My apologies

I should have included a vomit bag with that.

[whistle]

3. Does manufacturing the news count...

...as employment in the manufacturing sector? If it does, then maybe BushCo figures they are adding new manufacturing jobs:freak:

[qanda]

5. Hey, why not?

It seems like the Bush* administration writes the news now anyway. They should probably just take over the production-- it will make it a little easier on the chimp-in-charge to get the propaganda exactly right.

[Barad Simith]

6. BY THE WAY, this link was sent to me by...

...a woman who voted for Bush in 2000, and who just a few months ago had every intention of helping to reelect him.

We discovered that talking about our political differences was dangerous to our friendship, so we stopped.

But just in the past three weeks, she's admitted to drifting leftward, with a resigned ABB attitude. She sent me this link today.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. They got this idea from their buddies in the business community

For years, corporations have been producing "news stories" about their products or services and donating them to local TV and radio stations. I don't know why the stations go for it, because they're just providing advertising for free--DUH!

I learned about this when I volunteered for a non-profit radio station. One of my jobs was to field and direct phone calls, and about once a week, I got a call from some company that wanted to offer the station a three-minute segment on their newest product, fully produced. I had the pleasure of telling them that a) the station was non-profit and listener-supported and b) therefore had no interest in providing them with free commercials.

The station had no news department and just took whatever came off the wire services. This was also instructive, because the announcer who was on duty determined which stories were selected. The regular morning announcer seemed to be trying to imitate commercial radio as much as possible, because once the major headlines were out of the way, he'd go for the jokey stuff or the news of the weird, but when one of the other announcers was sitting in for him--especially when the leftist activist was sitting in for him--the news would get much more serious.

[DaveSZ]

8. .

Under law federal money cannot be used for "publicity or propaganda purposes" unless authorised by Congress.




Guess who controls Congress?