Flutterby™! : More "Journalism"

RC3 had a link to a New York Times article on the G.A.O.'s attempt to curb propaganda news segments produced by the government and pointed out that Eric Umansky had distilled the article to its salient points:

And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings.

What disturbs me isn't that the Bush administration is instructing the executivate branch to ignore the G.A.O., it's that so many news sources are playing along with this (or are just too damned lazy to check their sources). The article has numerous examples:

Even these measures, though, do not fully capture the reach of her work. Consider the case of News 10 Now, a cable station in Syracuse owned by Time Warner. In February 2004, days after the government distributed its Medicare segment, News 10 Now broadcast a virtually identical report, including the suggested anchor lead-in. The News 10 Now segment, however, was not narrated by Ms. Ryan. Instead, the station edited out the original narration and had one of its reporters repeat the script almost word for word.

The station's news director, Sean McNamara, wrote in an e-mail message, "Our policy on provided video is to clearly identify the source of that video." In the case of the Medicare report, he said, the station believed it was produced and distributed by a major network and did not know that it had originally come from the government.