Government videos for TV news come under scrutiny

Federal investigators are scrutinizing television segments in which the Bush administration paid people to pose as journalists praising the benefits of the new Medicare law, which would be offered to help elderly Americans with the costs of their prescription medicines.

The videos are intended for use in local television news programs. Several include pictures of President Bush receiving a standing ovation from a crowd cheering as he signed the Medicare law on Dec. 8. The materials were produced by the Department of Health and Human Services, which called them “video news releases”, but the source is not identified. Two videos end with the voice of a woman saying, “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.”

The production company, Home Front Communications, said it hired her to read a script prepared by the government. The government also prepared scripts that can be used by news anchors introducing what the administration describes as a made-for-television “story package.”

Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, expressed disbelief that any television stations would present the Medicare videos as real news segments, considering the current debate about the merits of the new law. “Those to me are just the next thing to fraud,” Kovach said. “It’s running a paid advertisement in the heart of a news program.” (New York Times)

House acts to boost penalty for indecency

The House on Mar. 11 approved sharply higher fines for broadcasters and entertainers who break indecency rules, as Congress moves closer to cracking down on incidents that are deemed to be obscene or profane. The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004 would give the Federal Communications Commission the ability to impose fines of up to $500,000 per violation, up from the current $27,500. Because many shows are syndicated and played on numerous stations around the country, fines could run into the millions of dollars. Broadcasters also could have their licenses revoked after a third violation.

The White House supports the bill. (Washington Post)

Journalist death toll doubles in 2003

A total of 36 journalists were killed as a direct result of their work during 2003, almost double the death toll of 19 in 2002, according to the latest in an annual series of reports on “Attacks on the Press” released Mar. 11 by the New York-based watchdog, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

The increase was due primarily to the war in Iraq, where 13 journalists died as a result of hostile acts — more than one-third of the total according to the report — which also said 136 journalists were imprisoned during the year.

Overall, the pursuit of the “war on terror” continued to have repercussions on journalists throughout the world as leaders used it to crack down on or intimidate independent or anti-government reporters and to defend themselves against Western charges that they were violating freedom of the press. (OneWorld.net)

Election ad ‘plays on fear of Arabs’

The re-election campaign of President George Bush provoked a new controversy Mar. 12, with a television ad campaign using a picture of an olive-skinned man to illustrate terrorism. As a voiceover warns that Bush’s presumptive opponent, John Kerry, is soft on terrorists, a split-screen shows people at an airport, and a young man with flickering eyes who turns menacingly towards the camera.

The ads are the most aggressive so far by targeting John Kerry by name. Arab Americans said the campaign plays on racism and fear, and could inflict further damage on a community marginalized after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In preying on bigotry, Republicans may have calculated there was little need to court the Arab American vote. A new poll Mar. 12 put Bush’s approval rating at just 32 percent among the sizeable Arab communities living in swing states such as Ohio and Michigan. (Guardian (UK))

Major new study blasts media coverage of WMDs

A new study of how the media has covered the issue of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), released Mar. 9, concludes, “Many stories stenographically reported the incumbent administration’s perspectives on WMD, giving too little critical examination of the way officials framed the events, issues, threats, and policy options.”

The study conducted by the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and the University of Maryland came to three other conclusions: too few stories offered alternative perspectives to the “official line” on WMD surrounding the Iraq conflict; most journalists accepted the Bush administration linking the “war on terror” inextricably to the issue of WMD; and most media outlets represented WMD as a “monolithic menace” without distinguishing between types of weapons and between possible weapons programs and the existence of actual weapons.

The complete study, titled “Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” is available at the CISSM web site www.cissm.umd.edu. (Editor and Publisher Online)

Bush site unplugs poster tool

The Bush-Cheney presidential campaign disabled features of a tool on its web site Mar. 11 that pranksters were using to mock the Republican presidential ticket. The poster tool has been up and running since December, but Ana Marie Cox, editor of the Washington political gossip blog Wonkette, turned it into a weapon of mass satire last week when she devoted several posts to the inner workings of the device she dubbed the “Sloganator.”

The tool originally let users generate a full-size campaign poster in PDF format, customized with a short slogan of their choice. But Bush critics began using the site to place their own political messages above a Bush-Cheney ’04 logo and a disclaimer stating that the poster was paid for by “Bush-Cheney ’04, Inc.”

The campaign changed the tool so that users could no longer enter their own messages, but only select from a pull-down list of states and coalition groups. The campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment. Chuck DeFeo, the electronic campaign manager for the Bush-Cheney campaign, declined to say how the campaign was filtering user input. “We are taking significant precautions to prevent the use of offensive materials on the GeorgeWBush.com web site he said. (Wired News)

US accused of trying to ‘control and intimidate’ the media in Iraq

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Mar. 15 accused the US authorities in Iraq of attempting to “control and intimidate” the media, following the recent detention of several Korean journalists by US forces in Baghdad.

On Mar. 6, the US military in Iraq detained three Korea Broadcasting System journalists for close to four hours on suspicion of carrying explosives. The journalists were all handcuffed and held in custody based on “internal regulations,” despite the fact that the Korean Embassy in Iraq had confirmed their identifications and had called for their immediate release. After finding that there were no traces of explosives in their luggage, and finally acknowledging that they were bona fide reporters covering the ongoing reconstruction process in Iraq, the journalists were eventually released.

This latest incident comes as the right of all journalists to enter Iraq to cover all sides of the story without the need for a license, specific permission, or accreditation by the US authorities has been restricted. At the beginning of March, US forces announced that all journalists currently in or arriving to Iraq must register with and obtain a press card from them. (IFJ)

Rumsfeld caught lying on ‘Face the Nation’

Following is an excerpt from the March 14 CBS news show Face the Nation in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is caught in a brazen lie by host Bob Schieffer. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times was also a guest.

Scheiffer: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

Rumsfeld: Well, you’re the — you and a few other critics are the only people I’ve heard use the phrase ‘immediate threat.’ I didn’t. The president didn’t. And it’s become kind of folklore that that’s — professor that’s what’s happened. The president went...

Scheiffer: You’re saying that nobody in the administration said that.

Rumsfeld: I — I can’t speak for nobody — everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.

Scheiffer: Vice president didn’t say that? The...

Rumsfeld: Not — if — if you have any citations, I’d like to see ‘em.

Friedman: We have one here. It says ‘some have argued that the nu’ — this is you speaking – ‘that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.’

Rumsfeld: And — and...

Friedman: It was close to imminent.

Rumsfeld: Well, I’ve tried – I’ve tried to be precise, and I’ve tried to be accurate. I’m s — suppose I’ve…

Friedman: ‘No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.’

Rumsfeld: Mm-hmm. It — my view of — of the situation was that he — he had — we — we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that — that we believed and we still do not know — we will know. (Buzzflash.com)

Bush praises man in speech on women’s rights

President George Bush has marked International Women’s Week by paying tribute to women reformers — but one of those he cited is really a man.

“Earlier today, the Libyan government released Fathi Jahmi. She’s a local government official who was imprisoned in 2002 for advocating free speech and democracy,” the president said in a speech at the White House Mar. 12.

The only problem was that, by all other accounts, “she” is in fact “he.”

“Definitely male,” said Alistair Hodgett, spokesman for the human rights advocacy group Amnesty International, whose representatives tried to visit Jahmi in prison during a recent visit to Libya.

“The advance of women’s rights and the advance of liberty are ultimately inseparable,” the president said. “We stand with courageous reformers.” (Reuters)