EDITORIAL – White House obviously too good for real news

Yesterday in a midday briefing, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan officially… Yesterday in a midday briefing, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan officially confirmed that the White House is going to totally disregard a Government Accountability Office finding.

According to its Web site, the Government Accountability Office is an agency that works for Congress and the American people. Often regarded as the investigative arm of Congress, GAO studies how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars and advises Congress and the heads of executive agencies about ways to make the government more effective and responsive. It evaluates federal programs, audits federal expenditures and issues legal opinions.

So when the agency determined that prepackaged administration video news releases constitute “illegal covert propaganda,” the viewing public could only hope White House officials would take that evaluation seriously. But instead, the government has decided the best way to spin the news is to produce the stories itself, perfecting the craft of disguising public relations as news, and getting plenty of airtime.

Of course government agencies should keep the public informed. There should be a constant flow of factual information coming from federal departments and agencies about programs — perfectly appropriate, and called a press release.

Not a news story, a press release informs journalists, who can then research, produce and report on the story. When the administration and public relations firms write and distribute video news releases to be passed on to the public as actual news stories, all parties suffer: the government appears manipulative, the journalists have not done their jobs and the public has been misguided.

While Christopher Lee of The Washington Post insists “that it is legal for federal agencies to feed TV stations prepackaged news stories that do not disclose the government’s role in producing them,” it is ridiculous to imply that the source of information is not almost as important as the information itself. People should know where the stories they hear come from.

Why aren’t television stations crediting their sources, especially when news sources often use each other for information? The government will keep sending out the video releases, against the wishes of the GAO, but when will news stations tell the public that the stories are coming straight from the White House?

Does Barry Bonds get to write his own news stories about his alleged steroid use and then feed them to ESPN? No. No one but the government gets away with it. And it’s not hard to see why, when White House officials choose to ignore the criticisms of the Government Accountability Office.