Brownwood, Fairness Doctrine, KXYL & "Spoonfeeding": Want the rest of the story ? Read this.....

 The GOP Media Machine Churns On
  By Robert Parry
  AlterNet
Wednesday 02 February 2005
Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher are not breaking new ground in accepting money for favorable coverage. The ethical line separating conservative "journalism" from government propaganda has long since been wiped away.
 Sometime after 2009, when historians pick through the wreckage left behind by George W. Bush's administration, they will have to come to grips with the role played by the professional conservative media infrastructure.
Indeed, it will be hard to comprehend how Bush got two terms as President of the United States, ran up a massive debt, and misled the country into at least one disastrous war - without taking into account the extraordinary influence of the conservative media, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh, from the Washington Times to the Weekly Standard.
 Recently, it's been revealed, too, that the Bush administration paid conservative pundits Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher while they promoted White House policies. Even fellow conservatives have criticized those payments, but the truth is that the ethical line separating conservative "journalism" from government propaganda has long since been wiped away.
For years now, there's been little meaningful distinction between the Republican Party and the conservative media machine.
In 1982, for instance, South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon established the Washington Times as little more than a propaganda organ for the Reagan-Bush administration. In 1994, radio talk show host Limbaugh was made an honorary member of the new Republican House majority.
The blurring of any ethical distinctions also can be found in documents from the 1980s when the Reagan-Bush administration began collaborating secretly with conservative media tycoons to promote propaganda strategies aimed at the American people.
In 1983, a plan, hatched by CIA Director William J. Casey, called for raising private money to sell the administration's Central American policies to the American public through an outreach program designed to look independent but which was secretly managed by Reagan-Bush officials.
 The project was implemented by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who had been moved to the National Security Council staff and put in charge of a "perception management" campaign that had both international and domestic objectives.
In one initiative, Raymond arranged to have Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch chip in money for ostensibly private groups that would back Reagan-Bush policies. According to a memo dated Aug. 9, 1983, Raymond reported that "via Murdock [sic], may be able to draw down added funds." (For details, see Parry's Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.)
 Besides avoiding congressional oversight, privately funded activities gave the impression that an independent group was embracing the administration's policies on their merits. Without knowing that the money had been arranged by the government, the public would be more inclined to believe these assessments than the word of a government spokesman.
 "The work done within the administration has to, by definition, be at arms length," Raymond wrote in an Aug. 29, 1983, memo.
 In foreign countries, the CIA often uses similar techniques to create what intelligence operatives call "the Mighty Wurlitzer," a propaganda organ playing the desired notes in a carefully scripted harmony. Only this time, the target audience was the American people.
 Journalists As Domestic Propaganda Machines
 In the 1980s, there were also propaganda operations directly comparable to the payments to Williams and Gallagher.
 In a May 13, 1985, memo, which surfaced during the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan-Bush official Jonathan Miller boasted about what he called "white propaganda" successes. As an example, he cited the Wall Street Journal's publication of a pro-administration opinion piece on Nicaragua that had been written by a government consultant, history professor John Guilmartin, Jr.
"Officially, this office had no role in its preparation," wrote Miller, who worked out of the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy. "The work of our operation is ensured by our office's keeping a low profile."
 At the time, a Reagan-Bush National Security Council official told me that the administration's domestic propaganda campaign was modeled after CIA psychological operations abroad where information is manipulated to bring a population into line with a desired political position.
 "They were trying to manipulate [U.S.] public opinion - using the tools of Walt Raymond's tradecraft which he learned from his career in the CIA covert operations shop," the official said.
 Another administration official offered a similar description to the Miami Herald's Alfonso Chardy. "If you look at it as a whole, the Office of Public Diplomacy was carrying out a huge psychological operation, the kind the military conduct to influence the population in denied or enemy territory," the official said.
After disclosure of these "perception management" schemes, a legal opinion by the congressional General Accounting Office concluded that the administration's secret operation amounted to "prohibited covert propaganda activities designed to influence the media and the public to support the administration's Latin American policies."
Conservative Echo Chamber
But these ad hoc propaganda tactics of the 1980s didn't go away.
With the investment of billions of dollars over the next two decades, the strategy grew into the permanent conservative media machine that we know today, a vast echo chamber to amplify conservative messages on TV, in newspapers, through magazines, over talk radio, with book publishing and via the internet.
 This media machine gives conservatives and Republicans a huge political advantage both during elections and between elections. It has even changed how Americans perceive the world and what information they rely on to make decisions.
The clout of this conservative media machine explains why millions of viewers to Rupert Murdoch's Fox News believe "facts" that aren't facts, such as their stubborn beliefs that the Bush administration did find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was collaborating with al-Qaeda in the Sept. 11 attacks.
These days, a large number of Americans are fed a steady diet of conservative propaganda disguised as information - and millions more are influenced by the conservative messages that pervade TV, radio and print.
But the influence doesn't stop there. Since the 1980s, this conservative media machine - often in collaboration with Republican politicians - has targeted and pressured mainstream journalists who discover information that conflicts with the propaganda.
 Many independent-minded mainstream reporters have seen their careers damaged or destroyed after being denounced as "liberal" or "anti-American." Other journalists have protected themselves by tilting their reporting to the right or avoiding many controversial stories altogether.
So, in 2002-2003, for instance, the major news media largely acquiesced to - rather than challenged - the Bush administration's false claims about Iraqi WMDs.
When some mainstream reporters, such as The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, did produce skeptical WMD stories, the articles were killed or buried deep inside the papers where they got little attention. By contrast, editors at The Washington Post and The New York Times trumpeted the administration's WMD charges on their front pages.
 New Rationales
In the weeks after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the conservative news media continued to hype every false alarm suggesting that WMDs had been found, possibly explaining why so many Americans think WMD was discovered.
Whenever that would happen, even at a small outlet like Consortiumnews.com, we would get e-mails from conservative readers demanding that we apologize to President Bush for doubting his word.
Surely at large news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post, the stakes were much higher. If WMD caches had been found, any reporter who had displayed any skepticism before the Iraq invasion would have been pilloried by the right-wing media and its legions of angry e-mail writers.
Those future historians gazing back on the Bush administration should not underestimate this fear factor in explaining why so few journalists at the major news outlets were willing to take the chance.
 It's also true that while career death awaited any journalist who questioned the WMD case - if stockpiles had been found - journalists have not suffered any serious consequences for buying into the Bush administration's false claims. Most right-wing commentators simply have shifted their war rationales and continued to berate critics of Bush's war policies.

 The Game
Rather than face up to any responsibility for the deaths of more than 1,400 U.S. soldiers and the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqis, the propaganda game has just moved on.
 Indeed, listening to the continued angry rhetoric on Fox News or right-wing talk radio, a listener would get the impression that these very well-paid, mostly white men were part of some persecuted minority, not a group of privileged individuals wielding extraordinary power.
 By now, the huge investment of money in this conservative media machine may mean that even if conservative "journalists" did reach an honest conclusion that their behavior was damaging the United States, they would be hard pressed to change course.
 That's because like any large bureaucracy, the conservative media machine has taken on a life of its own.
Thousands of conservative "journalists" are dependent on its perpetuation for their livelihoods. There are mortgages to pay and school tuitions due. It's much easier just to continue doing the job and keeping the assembly lines of propaganda humming, rather than trying to shut the operation down or dramatically change the product.
 In that way, the conservative "journalists" are like workers in a factory that's polluting a river which flows through the neighboring countryside. If the pollution is stopped, they fear they will lose their jobs. So it's in their interest to fight environmental controls, keep the factory running and leave it to someone else to clean up the mess.

Dirty Money
Another aspect of the conservative media corruption can be found in where some of the right-wing money originates.
The evidence is clear, for instance, that the wealth of one major conservative media tycoon - Rev. Sun Myung Moon - traces back to money illicitly laundered into the United States and possibly even to operatives connected to organized crime.
In the late 1970s, a congressional investigation, headed by Rep. Donald Fraser, discovered that Moon was a South Korean intelligence operative whose operations were financed from secretive bank accounts in Japan. Investigators also uncovered Moon's close ties to the Japanese yakuza crime syndicate which runs drugs, gambling and prostitution rings in Asia.
Moon also associated with right-wing South American leaders implicated in cocaine trafficking. In 1980, Moon's organization aided Bolivia's "Cocaine Coup" conspirators who overthrew a left-of-center government and seized dictatorial power. The violent coup installed drug-tainted military officers at the head of Bolivia's government, giving the putsch the nickname the "Cocaine Coup."
U.S. government evidence about Moon's money-laundering activities led to his conviction for tax fraud in 1982. But in that same year, flush with seemingly unlimited supplies of cash, Moon established the Washington Times as a reliable booster of Reagan-Bush policies.
Since then, the theocrat, who considers himself the new Messiah, has become a political untouchable in Washington. Both President Ronald Reagan and President George H.W. Bush made special pronouncements about how valuable they considered Moon's newspaper.
After leaving office, George H.W. Bush gave paid speeches on behalf of Moon's front groups. Though the exact amount of Moon's payments to Bush has never been revealed, one former Unification Church official told me the Moon organization had budgeted $10 million for the ex-president.
Confusion
So, Armstrong Williams might be understandably confused by the furor over his $241,000 grant from Bush's Education Department to promote the "no children left behind" program. The same may be true of columnist Maggie Gallagher who touted Bush's pro-marriage policies while on a $21,500 contract from the Department of Health and Human Services.
 After all, many of their conservative colleagues have taken buckets full of money from Moon's bottomless well of cash.
Amid this moral confusion on the right - as the U.S. national treasury is drained, the dollar sinks to record lows and American soldiers die in a war launched for a fake reason - it's getting harder and harder to notice any bright ethical lines.
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  Fair and Balanced?
  By Eric Boehlert
  Salon.com
Tuesday 01 February 2005
Some Democrats are using Bush's pay-for-say media scandals to push for a new Fairness Doctrine for broadcasting.
As the punditocracy's payola scandal - which has featured conservative commentators such as Armstrong Williams cashing Bush administration checks - continues to spread in Washington, some Democrats hope the fallout will be enough to kick-start support for the Fairness Doctrine. Rescinded in 1987 by the Federal Communications Commission, the original doctrine made sure that radio and television broadcasters covered political topics with fairness and balance.
Architects of the policy, established in 1949, concerned themselves with keeping the airwaves open to both opponents and proponents of public-policy issues. They likely never foresaw the possibility of broadcast pundits secretly being on the government payroll while touting White House policies.
 But Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., thinks the growing outrage over media misconduct will help spur interest in the doctrine. Last week she introduced the Fairness and Accountability in Media Act, which would revive the Fairness Doctrine with new requirements for local broadcasters. Currently, the FCC is investigating the Williams case for possible payola violations - accepting cash to say things on the air and not disclosing the payments to audiences.
  "It's a lot different now since Armstrong Williams," Slaughter says. "The airwaves should be used for public benefit. It's broadcasters' one obligation for condition of license. There's no question they don't operate in the public good."
 She and some other congressional members blame the loss of fair broadcasting on the ongoing consolidation of newspapers and broadcast outlets, resulting in few owners controlling much of America's information. Media consolidation "is the most critical issue facing the American people today: whether to allow a handful of people to determine what information we receive and influence the decisions we make," says Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., who will head the soon-to-be announced Media Reform Caucus in Congress. "In a free and open society, in a democratic republic, you need a free and open discussion of the issues. We don't have that today."
The success of the Reagan administration in overturning the Fairness Doctrine ushered in a new age of talk radio, allowing stations to broadcast one political point of view day after day, week after week. As Hinchey and others point out, talk radio has spurred a rightward tilt of the press. A study released last June by Democracy Radio, revealed that national and local conservative broadcasts totaled over 40,000 hours every week, while weekly liberal programming totaled just over 3,000 hours. "We need to return to a free and open discussion of the issues," Hinchey says.
Hinchey and Slaughter face entrenched opposition from both broadcasters who don't want the return of regulation and Republicans who are quite content with the current media landscape. During the Fairness Doctrine debate in the 1980s, the Republican opposition seemed to flow from a general philosophy that there ought to be fewer government regulations on big business. By the '90s, with right-wing talkers such as Rush Limbaugh enjoying enormous success, Republicans often challenged any attempt to bring back the Fairness Doctrine on purely partisan grounds, labeling them efforts to "Hush Rush."
As for the station owners themselves, "We think it's a dangerous for the government to be dictating what's on radio and television programming," says Dennis Wharton, spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, which lobbied strenuously to get the Fairness Doctrine repealed. "Look at the media business since the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated, which was before satellite TV and the Internet. You'd be hard-pressed to make the case that there are fewer outlets for expression today than there was then."
  "I'm troubled by this development because the Fairness Doctrine has been found to be unconstitutional," adds Adam Thierer, director of telecommunications studies at the Cato Institute in Washington. "Somebody forgot to tell Representative Slaughter the '80s are over." Indeed, for Beltway insiders, any discussion about the Fairness Doctrine will bring back memories of the exhausting debate, which dragged on - in and out of the courtrooms - for years during the Reagan administration.
When the FCC instituted the Fairness Doctrine in 1949, it considered station licensees "public trustees," obligated to give a reasonable opportunity for contrasting points of view to be heard on controversial issues of public importance. The FCC never used a stopwatch to time how many minutes proponents and opponents of an issue were given, nor did the FCC require that specific programs grant "equal time" to guests. It simply stated that in the big picture, over a span of days, weeks and months, broadcast outlets should be able to show a general balance granted to certain topics.
The doctrine proved its staying power in 1969, when, in a celebrated case, the Supreme Court ordered a Pennsylvania television station to give equal airtime to an author who had been attacked during the course of a program. Within 20 years, though, Republican-appointed judges and a Republican-appointed FCC chairman succeeded in dismantling the doctrine.
 The first blow came in 1981 with appointment of Mark Fowler to head the FCC. A communications attorney who had served on Ronald Reagan's campaign staff in 1976 and 1980, and who once equated television to a "toaster with pictures," Fowler was determined to rescind the Fairness Doctrine over the objections of Congress. In 1985, his FCC issued the "Fairness Report," which concluded that the doctrine had a "chilling effect" on public debate and likely violated the First Amendment: "We no longer believe that the Fairness Doctrine, as a matter of policy, serves the public interest."
Judges took note. In 1986, the U.S. Court of Appeals' Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork ruled in a 2-1 decision that the Fairness Doctrine was not a law passed by Congress and was therefore not binding; it was merely an agency regulation, which meant Fowler's FCC had final say in the matter. In August 1987 the FCC, with Reagan's support, announced the doctrine was dead and that the agency would no longer enforce it.
Capitol Hill revolted. Within months, the House voted 301-102 to codify the doctrine as law, thereby forcing the FCC to reinstate the guideline. The Senate followed suit. Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., were among the those who led the bipartisan charge to save the Fairness Doctrine, and in the halls of Congress, Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum, lobbied on its behalf.
 Nevertheless, Reagan vetoed the final bill. In 1989, bipartisan Congress members again sought to revive the doctrine, but President George H.W. Bush threatened a veto and stymied their attempt. A third effort in 1993 to get the doctrine passed into law met with little support from the Clinton White House, and so it too languished in Congress.
Today, there are indications that bipartisan support for the Fairness Doctrine lives on, albeit outside Congress. In a poll conducted last April by Garin Hart Yang Research, and commissioned by the liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America, an overwhelming majority of voters - 77 percent - favored restoring rules requiring fairness and balance on the public airwaves. What's more, 74 percent of conservatives, and 71 percent of Republicans, agreed that television and radio should be required to present issues in a balanced way.
As an opponent of the doctrine, Thierer at the Cato Institute fears that the recent bad press surrounding the Williams controversy, Sinclair Broadcasting's attempt last fall to run a one-sided anti-John Kerry documentary, and CBS's ill-fated report on Bush's Texas Air National Guard record, may indeed prompt more and more Congress members to give the doctrine another look. When it comes to what ails the media, Thierer says, "The left and the right came to same regulatory conclusion: We should do 'something' about it."
Bipartisan displeasure with the press may also allow the Media Reform Caucus, which at first will likely consist entirely of Democrats, to enlist some Republicans. In the uphill battle to restore real fairness and balance to the airwaves, backers will need all the help they can get.
© Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org