3.18.2005

White House VNR?

I heard a story about this on NPR and then my bro mentioned he read about it in the New York Times. I searched every which way on Google, and couldn't find any genuine footage from these things. If anyone can point me in the right direction I would be thankful.

I should note, that I find it strange that I can't find this stuff. It would seem that if it is so controversial, and improper, the footage would be widely available. Is this reason to be skeptical?

3 comments:

Joe said...

The article mentioned several times that this practice dates back to the Clinton administration. And why now? How bout because Bush wasn't simply creating propagandistic pieces for the news; he was actually paying reporters to spin his policies! That's the eggregious part. The failure of local news shows to deliver "hard facts," is, of course, no suprise, since local news has long been an anemic and sanitized mechanism to deliver sports and weather, with occasional dashes of crime and human interest stories. But paying nationally syndicated reporters and columnists is despicable.

Ben said...

I posted this question not to debate the validity of the piece (though that is a worthy point to address), but because I couldn't find any examples of this supposedly bad behavior. If a paper like the NYT is going to devote serious column inches to an issue, one would think that there would be video clips a-plenty floating 'round out there. Where are they?

It's not that articles like the one mentioned don't have steam or the issue isn't being covered. A casual search on Google shows that it is indeed being covered, heartily. What bothers me is that these articles do not show me what they so easily call propaganda, they seem to think it's enough to call it such. Since they are implicated, I would simply prefer to not rely on the MSM for this kind of declarition.

I heard a sound clip on NPR over the weekend, and I must say it made the issue much more interesting to me. It featured a former MSM television reporter actually signing off with a very official sounding, "This is Karen Ryan reporting". The article pointed out that Ms. Ryan is employed by a PR firm, thus she is no longer a "reporter" in the common parlance. So while this issue may relate to Armstron Williams-type in that a person was paid to promote a government funded program, it's not the same thing.

Joe said...

Although there is certainly cause for concern when NPR accepts money from interest groups to cover certain issues, it is another matter entirely when the money comes directly from the administration.

(Sorry Ben, I understand your desire to find these things, but I am useless in that pursuit).