The Best Coverage Money Can Buy

What part of "free press" does the Bush Administration not understand?

It apparently was not enough that they were embarrassed earlier this year for secretly feeding favorable stories into the American news media. Slick "video news releases" were produced for unattributed broadcast on local TV stations. Pundit Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 to shill for the No Child Left Behind Act, a move that the Government Accountability Office decried as "covert propaganda." Conservative blogger and gay escort Jeff Gannon received credentials to attend White House press briefings for the sole purpose of asking softball questions at difficult times.

Proving that some people just never learn, the Administration has now been caught doing the exact same thing, this time in the Iraqi press.

In articles published this week by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and other sources, it was revealed that the US military has been surreptitiously placing stories in Iraqi newspapers, TV and radio. Pentagon "psychological operations" staffers write more or less truthful but heavily slanted stories with such feel-good headlines as "More Money Goes to Iraq's Development." The articles are then handed to a private PR firm called the Lincoln Group for editing and translation into Arabic, which then pays Iraqi publications as much as $1500 to run the stories under their own reporters' bylines. The US government also used our taxpayer dollars to buy a newspaper and radio station in Iraq for more direct propagandizing. And if all that weren't enough, the Army created an organization called the Baghdad Press Club, whose members were paid as much as $200 a month depending on how many favorable stories they churned out.

None of the planted stories carried any indication that they were provided by the US government.

The story was leaked by Army officers rightly appalled by the practice, saying that trying to secretly control the Iraqi press could only destroy American credibility and bolster the insurgency. "Here we are trying to create the principles of democracy in Iraq," a Pentagon official told the Los Angeles Times. "Every speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it."

Sadly, all this chicanery and secret propaganda is not really surprising. The White House has always loathed the very existence of an independent press and has done everything in its power to turn the American media into dutiful stenographers. Not to mention that the Administration has always treated the soaring unpopularity of the war, both in Iraq and here at home, as more of a sales problem than an actual policy issue. After all, why should we go to the time and trouble of actually thinking up a new strategy when we can just change public perception of the existing one?

Indeed, the Administration basically admitted as such in its much-hyped National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, in which one of the methods of "strengthen[ing] public understanding of coalition efforts" is "a free, independent, and responsible Iraqi media" (emphasis added). In this context, "responsible" apparently means "subservient."

The problem with this, of course, is that an uncensored press free of government control is absolutely essential to the functioning of a democratic society, and the Administration's manipulation of the fledgling Iraqi media has - once again - destroyed our trustworthiness in that shattered nation. The fiasco has given the Iraqi insurgency and everyone else in the world yet another reason to dislike and distrust the United States. Heckuva job, guys.

President Bush once joked that "if this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just as long as I'm the dictator." With his open contempt for the very principle of a free press, it sounds like he's operating true to form.