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| Religion Forum Index » Mormon Forum » BusCo and Freedom of the Press... |
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| Author |
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| John Manning... |
 Posted: Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:12 pm |
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Guest
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The Obama administration, according to Reporters Without Borders, is
actually setting quite a strong example of press freedom for the world.
In 2008, the organization found that in terms of press freedom, the U.S.
ranked 36th out of 173 countries. Its report singled out “wars carried
out in the name of the fight against terrorism” as a cause for the steep
decline in press freedoms around the world.
Just one year later, the United States has jumped from 36th to 20th.
“Barack Obama’s election as president and the fact that he has a less
hawkish approach than his predecessor have had a lot to do with this,”
concluded Reporters Without Borders.
So what type of example did the Bush administration set? A few lowlights:
– The Pentagon had a secret program to use retired military analysts
to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime
performance.” Most of these analysts had “ties to military contractors
vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.” When
the “message machine” became public, Perino defended the program as
“absolutely appropriate.”
– The U.S. military was “secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish
stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of
the U.S. mission in Iraq.” The articles contained anonymous quotes from
U.S. military officials — which may or may not have been authentic —
and “read more like press releases than news stories.”
– The Education Department paid conservative pundit Armstrong
Williams hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Bush’s No Child
Left Behind law. Even after the corruption was uncovered, the
administration defended it as “a permissible use of taxpayer funds.”
– The Government Accountability Office found that the Bush
administration violated anti-propaganda laws when it disguised two
promotional ads — on federal drug policy and Medicare — as news
reports. The “reports” aired on dozens of stations, and the GAO
“faulted the administration for distributing seemingly independent,
ready-to-air reports that did not inform viewers that they came from
the government.”
Bush also called a New York Times reporter “a major league asshole” —
and never apologized. In fact, Bush never gave the NYT a single
interview throughout his presidency. The White House frequently went
after NBC News, and Perino has admitted that they essentially froze out
MSNBC “towards the end.”
Links here: http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/25/perino-bush-media/ |
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