Enron: Patron Saint of Bush's Fake News
look at the ongoing 60-stop "presidential roadshow" in which Mr. Bush has "conversations on Social Security" with "ordinary citizens" for the consumption of local and national newscasts. As in the president's "town meeting" campaign appearances last year, the audiences are stacked with prescreened fans; any dissenters who somehow get in are quickly hustled away by security goons. But as The Washington Post reported last weekend, the preparations are even more elaborate than the finished product suggests; the seeming reality of the event is tweaked as elaborately as that of a television reality show. Not only are the panelists for these conversations recruited from administration supporters, but they are rehearsed the night before, with a White House official playing Mr. Bush. One participant told The Post, "We ran through it five times before the president got there." Finalists who vary just slightly from the administration's pitch are banished from the cast at the last minute, "American Idol"-style.
Like Enron's stockholders, American taxpayers pay for the production of such propaganda, even if its message, like that of the Enron show put on for visiting analysts, misrepresents and distorts the bottom line of the scheme that is being sold. We paid for last year's phony television news reports in which the faux reporter Karen Ryan "interviewed" administration officials who gave partially deceptive information hyping the Medicare prescription-drug program. We paid Armstrong Williams his $240,000 for delivering faux-journalistic analysis of the No Child Left Behind act.
The administration cycled the Ryan and Williams paychecks through the PR giant Ketchum Communications. Ketchum was also one of the companies hired to flack for Andersen, the now-defunct Enron accounting firm that shredded a ton of documents. We don't know what, if any, role Ketchum is playing in the White House's Social Security propaganda push, though we do know the company has received at least $97 million from the government, according to a Congressional report.
That $97 million may yet prove a mere down payment. The Times reported last weekend that the administration told executive-branch agencies simply to ignore a stern directive by the Congressional Government Accountability Office discouraging the use of "covert propaganda" like the Karen Ryan "news reports." In other words, the brakes are off, and before long, the government could have a larger budget for fake news than actual television news divisions have for real news. At last weekend's Gridiron dinner, Mr. Bush made a joke about how "most" of his good press on Social Security came from Armstrong Williams, and the Washington press corps yukked it up. The joke, however, is on them - and us.
- posted by geoff @ #