Bush Propaganda: 'Liberal Media' Myth Finally Put To Rest

In what can only be considered an unfolding scandal, in the last two weeks three supposed journalists have been exposed as propagandists, hired by the Bush Administration and paid for with taxpayer money to promote Bush policies under the guise of journalism.

Bush and the right-wing pundits have popularised the myth of a 'liberal media' over the years. Bush has continually claimed that the media is reporting only the bad news from Iraq, for example, and not the good news. Curiously, not even far-right propagandists like FauxNews can come up with this alleged 'good news.'

But, as we have seen in the last 2 weeks, the instances of Bush Administration payola to several different journalists by the Office of National Drug Policy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the closely-related use of government personnel in the Social Security Administration.

One of the worst things that any believer in democracy can imagine is that we cannot trust what we are being told. Propagandised news is a symptom of tyranny, not democracy. Nazi Germany perfected the art of propaganda. The current PBS documentary on Auschwitz features Nazi concentration camp guards who tell how they believed in the extermination of Jews due to the 'news' they had heard, telling them that the Jews were responsible for all the ills of thei nation.

Famously, the Soviet Union produced two newspapers: Pravda [which means 'truth'] and Izvestia [which means 'news']. The Soviet population used to say 'There is no news in Pravda, and no truth in Izvestia.'

Now, we are seeing that the American media being is turned into a propaganda machine. This appears to be a systemic policy of payola for propaganda, all uder the guise of news, that cannot be acceptable in a free democracy. The policy itself is so distasteful that Bush himself decried his own Administration's practices in a news conference this week. There is no way of denying the strategy when it is spread across four different goverenment agencies so far, with undoubtedly more to come.

In fact, one must wonder whether past instances, such as Robert Novak's outing of an undercover CIA operative, were reporting or a government-funded operation.

All Americans should demand not only the misuse of their taxes for propaganda purposes, but an investigation into the practice. Our Founding Fathers were vehement in their determination that a free press was one of the strong pillars in keeping America free from tyranny. It is highly disturbing that just days after Bush denounced tyranny and declared a virtual war against it, it is discovered that his own Administration practices a policy that is virtually the exclusive practice of tyrannical regimes.