Straight to Video

The media and government have found a surefire way to drop even lower in public esteem.

The news media like to indulge-oh, let's be honest, encourage-official Washington in careening from one crisis to another. That's true even when the flap in question concerns the practices of the media itself. Such was the case earlier this year, when the relationship between television news outlets and increasingly effective and tech-savvy spinmeisters at federal agencies became the subject of national headlines. And as is usually the case in such situations, both sides came out looking bad.

It all started, well, quite a while ago, actually, when several agencies-notably the Defense, State and Agriculture departments-moved beyond the business of pushing press releases on skeptical journalists and began to turn out prepackaged news reports in the form of "video news releases." The practice attracted little notice until last year, when the Government Accountability Office issued smackdowns to the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Health and Human Services Department, saying VNRs that they had produced violated a congressional prohibition against using appropriated funds for "publicity or propaganda."

In February, GAO chief David M. Walker felt moved to clarify in a memo to all agency heads that they should stay out of the news business, unless their reports contained "clear disclosure to the television viewing audience that this material was prepared by or in cooperation with the government department or agency."

The Bush administration, having just recently been forced to polish off a rather large plate of crow over agencies' efforts to hire political pundits to push administration policies, was in no mood to roll over this time. On March 11, the Office of Management and Budget and the Justice Department issued memos putting Walker in his place. Justice, not GAO, gets the last word on what executive branch agencies can and cannot do, wrote OMB Director Joshua Bolten. And Justice's position, wrote Steven G. Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general, was that agencies don't have to disclose that their video news releases are government-produced. They just have to make sure they don't advocate particular positions in their reports.

Two days later, The New York Times weighed in with a 5,000-word front-page story detailing the extent to which VNRs have become a staple of local TV news. Why? Because when they're used, everybody except the viewers wins. "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."

It's very tempting for those of us in the media to peg this as a government problem. And it's clear that some of the slickly produced agency releases are clearly designed to blend into the media mainstream without being recognizable as PR. For example, Agriculture's Broadcast Media and Technology Center brags on its Web site that its services-which are used not only by USDA agencies but other federal organizations such as the Energy Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House-provide "an excellent avenue for agencies to get their message out to consumers and the agricultural community. The center's VNRs usually air on two nationally syndicated programs with targeted audiences of farmers and strong rural viewership, AgDay and U.S. Farm Report. Stories also air in a variety of commercial television station markets."

But if agencies are actively seeking to blur the line between news and PR, TV outlets aren't doing much to stop them. As the Times reported, it's quite clear that some of them not only look the other way in airing government-produced reports, they actively seek to pass off such reports as their own. Agency public affairs officers are paid to try to make their organizations look good. It's up to the media to separate the hype from the news.

Unless, of course, both media organizations and the federal agencies they cover want to sink even lower in national opinion polls. In that case, then by all means they should continue to collude to produce fake news and foist it off on TV audiences as the real thing.