Everything you know is wrong!

Remember that line from Firesign Theatre? How can something so ridiculous be so true?

I'm going to be writing more and more about the topic of the Death of Journalism, which has really been on life support for a couple of decades now. I feel comfortable in saying, without hyperbole, that the Bush administration pulled the plug on journalism and buried it in a shallow grave.

But I want to focus on the main cause of death and specifically, an effective propaganda tool employed consistently by Bush and his cronies.

From the obvious complicity of Sinclair Broadcasting (FOX "News," its alias) to planting stooges in the White House Press Corps, the Bush Regime is not making news--it is creating it.

To learn more, you may want to read the following posts, archived here under February 2005:

• What would have happened...
• How stupid does he think we are? How stupid ARE we?
• The difference between journalism and Bush's talking heads

In those postings you will read

• That the Bush administration paid commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the "No Child Left Behind" program;
• That the Bush administration gave Maggie Gallagher a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's marriage initiative, which she then promoted in her syndicated column as if she were not being paid to plug it;
• That common shill, Jeff Gannon, posed as a journalist in a presidential news conference, asking whether President Bush could work with Democrats, describing them as "people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."

These are not journalists reporting facts. These are operatives, hired hands, who are heading real journalists off at the pass in order to advance Bush's plans and to control what you, as citizens, actually hear reported as fact.

In the words of syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., "A government that is allowed to create its own reality is a government that can get away with anything."

Does anyone reading this still doubt the possibility that voting machines were manipulated, as well as major media outlets, on Election Day 2004 and 2000, in order to ensure that the outcome would favor Bush, no matter how you voted?

And that was only the beginning. If you read the news as it's reported, you will find little tidbits every day that smell awfully funny, such as this "reporter's" question of Condoleezza Rice, an unelected official who will surely be the next President of the United States (with the Bush family's hand up her back, moving her mouth) if people don't get smart VERY quickly. In a Washington Post story published today, it was reported that Rice won't rule out running for president in 2008. As she was being questioned by the media, this was observed:

Some political operatives relish the idea of Rice taking on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., in 2008. One of the Washington Times questioners said, "You could save us from Hillary."

No journalist would have said this, even in fun. Only a Bush shill would have made that statement, hoping to plant fear in the hearts and minds of all readers. The "Washington Times'" credentials have always been questionable at best, but with this statement, they make their agenda perfectly clear.

There was also a story in the New York Times today which dissects one aspect of the Bush Propaganda Machine: its use of pre-fabricated "news stories" handed out to media outlets for publication, which are frequently run "as-is," with no verification of the "facts" therein.

Sunday, March 13, 2005
In Bush's agencies, P.R. blurs into news
By David Barstow and Robin Stein
The New York Times

It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for U.S. farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety actually was a public-relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government aggressively has used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations long have distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. 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 broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgment of the government's role in their production.

NOW, DO ANY OF YOU STILL THINK "Wag the Dog" was an entertaining but hyperbolic little movie, but that NO ONE would ever actually get away with controlling the media?

Think again.