Slow News Day

Before the idiot box was idiotic and the boob tube gained its, well, boob, there was truth on television. The vast wasteland was sprinkled with islands of worth: news programs, those last bastions of truth in a swirling sea of superficiality, were always there to inform, frankly and objectively. Americans could sleep peacefully knowing that the Rather-Brokaw-Jennings triumvirate could always be counted on to emerge from the evening twilight, ready to tell an anxious nation how to think and what to believe.

Then things began to change. People came up with ideas like “reality television” and “Fox News.” “Objectivity,” like “weapons of mass destruction,” was reduced to a kind of meaningless mantra, employed repeatedly to suggest credibility (and “reality”) where there was none. Now a species of government propaganda stands poised to cast the deciding vote for legitimate news’ expulsion from television’s tribal council: the pre-fabricated, ready-to-broadcast, government-produced news report.

Welcome to television’s new theater of the absurd.

Putting to use a public relations technique long used by private corporations, the Bush administration has made and distributed hundreds of its own news segments in the last four years. Public relations professionals, under false names, pose as journalists to “file” reports on everything from the success of the War on Terror to agricultural policy. The reports are filmed in such a way as to masquerade as perfectly normal parts of regular news programming; few, if any, viewers could possibly be expected to divine the government’s involvement in their production. Once completed, all at the government’s expense, the clips are distributed free to ever-thrifty news outlets that are only too eager to air the material with little or no indication of its origin. The practice is inherently dishonest, both as a way for the government to promote itself and as a source of cheap programming for news outlets.

The government is dishonest in this form of self-promotion because by disguising taxpayer-financed public relations statements as objective news broadcasts, the government makes a deliberate attempt to prey on Americans’ trust of the news media as a source of unbiased information. The Bush administration has, with pre-packaged news, stumbled on a most insidious breed of propaganda: by doing news programs the (dubious) favor of covering pro-Bush news for them, the administration has taken rabid self-promotion to new depths. In the process, the Bush administration has implicated itself in a dizzying conflict-of-interest, made all the more unethical because the scheme, financed by tax dollars, has taxpayers paying to provide themselves with sly governmental propaganda.

This is just not kosher; imagine the scandal if University Hall were to use termbill revenues to pay public relations professionals to write news stories for The Crimson under assumed identities. If President Bush’s government wants good press, developing initiatives worthy of objective praise—and not simply writing the news itself—would be a good place to start.

Media outlets are in the wrong, too. By allowing their ethics to be enslaved to their pocketbooks, news providers who have aired government news broadcasts have violated their responsibility to provide conflict-of-interest-free news to their audiences. Caught with their hand in the cookie jar, it’s now up to the nightly news to return to whatever ethical purity it has ever been able to call its own, for its own sake.

The prospect of the government’s sneaking into the news business with its pre-packaged news segments is a scary one indeed. The government’s under-handed assault on the integrity of the nightly news must cease, either by the president’s own hand or by Congressional action to stop the shameless wasting of tax dollars on subliminal self-promotion, particularly of the mock news-broadcast variety. It’s the responsibility of the government to stay out of journalism and the duty of news broadcasters to keep the government off their turf, lest television’s last little island of truth be submerged forever.

Adam Goldenberg ’08, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.