About a month ago, independent chroniclers who regularly collaborate with the big American daily newspaper networks confessed to having received important sums in exchange for promoting various government programs in their articles. As an example, we note that one of these syndicated columnists pocketed 240,000 dollars to defend tooth and nail the "No Child Left Behind" educational policy dear to President Bush. This story is obviously the result of propaganda. Of propaganda and greed for the clink of money.
Under the Bush administration, the will to drown public opinion in its ideological prejudices has taken on enormous, even gigantic, proportions. After having spent months dissecting the sources of subjects broadcast in the framework of television news programs by hundreds of stations in the country, the New York Times observed that dozens of these reportages had been conceived, realized, and distributed by government agencies and departments. For the benefit of the White House, but also to fatten the wallets of the management and shareholders of Fox, CNN and others.
Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, no less than 60 reportages produced by the State Department have invaded the airwaves without the source of these treatments ever being disclosed. In the style of "Now you see it, now you don't," the department in question is a past master: not only does it supply a finished product, but it has also organized itself to flood the networks with pictures and sounds. How does it do that? According to the investigation by the New York Times reporters, departmental communications experts have observed that by sending the Reuters and Associated Press agencies thousands of images and audio tapes produced by the department, but without commentaries, they obtain a maximum result, since, after the fact, the Reuters of this world redistribute these unidentified objects to hundreds of stations.
In the saga of reorienting the world's views to one's own liking, the Pentagon has joined the party. It has "opened" its Pentagon Channel. Even better, Pentagon officers will tailor-make news. Does the director of the Fox or NBC station in Burlington want a subject? Off they go! They find a marine from the town, film him, send the film - all, asserts this military program's boss, with the objective of making "every soldier a star in his home town."
The odium of this scandal also resides in the fact that the heads of the implicated networks, Fox and CNN above all, receive money every time they support this distribution, on top of collecting from their franchisees. Not without irony, the New York Times' reporters revealed that the time allocated to news broadcasts by local stations had sometimes increased in a pronounced manner even as the number of reporters continues to decrease. This verges on swindle.
Rudyard Kipling's famous observation that "the first victim of a war is always truth" remains contemporary. The second victim? The taxpayer.
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