On unethical media practices, by the NYT

Last Sunday's New York Times (registration required) challenges head-on the aggressive media policy pursued by the Bush administration. Although we got some headlines from the recent revelations about covert payments to Armstrong Williams and other conservative commentators, the current policy focuses on the federal government's penchant for

a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

And this is the problem. It is bad that the administration is sending out propaganda masquerading as news (otherwise known as VNRs, or Video News Releases). It is much worse for local TV news to air this material without indicating where it comes from! Local TV news benefits as follows:

Local affiliates are spared the expense of digging up original material. Public relations firms secure government contracts worth millions of dollars. The major networks, which help distribute the releases, collect fees from the government agencies that produce segments and the affiliates that show them. The administration, meanwhile, gets out an unfiltered message, delivered in the guise of traditional reporting.

This is a basic issue of ethics, for TV news station managers even more than for the government. Stations need to accept that they must acknowledge where they're getting this material from. It's inconceivable to me that any station manager worth her salt wouldn't do this. As for the federal government: If it's so intent on producing this propaganda then they should put it on a government-run TV service and call it by its nice name: public diplomacy. At least then no-one would be under any illusions about where the information was coming from. And btw, the government already does this for people overseas. Government-funded instruments of propaganda/public diplomacy have been around for decades. You may have heard of them: Voice of America; Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; and TV/Radio Marti, among others.