Truth Is, Bush's Propaganda Hurts the U.S.

[kentuck]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-martinez16mar16,0,4451054.story

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Spin is nothing new in American politics, but the Bush administration has not contented itself with trying to influence the news. It's in the business of producing the news itself, in the hopes of passing it off as generic, third-party reporting. This is propaganda parading as journalism, in the finest PRI (or Soviet) tradition. As the New York Times reported Sunday, at least 20 federal agencies have been peddling TV news segments to local stations across the country. Viewers have been treated to news reports of happy farmers, happy air travelers and happy beachgoers without ever knowing that these happy but fake news reports were produced by the Agriculture Department, the Transportation Security Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency.

This clumsy branding of George W. Bush's vision of America to Americans will not only backfire at home, it invariably subverts efforts to brand America overseas. Public candor and transparency are supposed to be one of the American brand's distinguishing assets. Because the administration insists on operating in its imagined version of reality, the U.S. and American credibility begin to look rather commonplace — and unreliable — to the world. You can imagine how many conspiracy theories are fed and validated on the streets of Cairo and Tehran when word gets out that U.S. government agencies produce their own propagandistic "news" reports

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It must be tempting for the leader of the sole superpower to imagine that he can define reality and impose it on the rest of world. But it's a dangerous temptation as the United States, for all its might, depends to an alarming degree on the trust of foreigners — increasingly the trust of a handful of Asian central banks — who are financing the nation's rising debt. The United States borrows $2 billion a day from overseas to maintain Americans' lavish lifestyle — a factoid you won't hear about in any taxpayer-financed fake news report.

Foreign central banks buy U.S. currency, in the form of Treasury notes, the way you buy stock in a company. Trouble is, they also can sell it the way you can dump stock when you lose faith in a company. The plummeting dollar is a global vote of no confidence in Brand U.S.A. and its current management. This decline is likely to accelerate if the administration doesn't begin to be more candid about the nation's real problems, such as the government's budgetary shortfalls, and take them on. Foreign investors don't want to trust their money to a country governed by propagandists. That's why they invested in the U.S. in the first place.

[European Socialist]

1. Good post

I wonder how much the world is boycotting us because of our insane leadership.