\"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 American 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 was actually 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 has aggressively used 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 different 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.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. \"Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution,\" said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. \"This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their actions.\"

millerbeach:
Consider it sent. I haven't seen anything like this in Chicago, I suspect it would have been uncovered pretty quickly had it occured in a larger media market, although Kansas City certainly isn't the smallest market in the country. No matter what the market, it is shady practices from an increasingly shady president.

Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.

An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with \"suggested\" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as \"independent\" journalism.

fantomas:
Come on, everybody, step up to the plate. Put the fire to the liars:Stopfakenews.org

millerbeach:
Fantamos, do you know which media outlets in Chicago aired these stories? I think it is time to make the protests to this kind of media blather local. I know enough people here in town to cause at least a few news directors to sweat if they were exposed for airing yellow journalism.