From the Washington Post:
\The Bush administration, rejecting an opinion from the Government Accountability Office, said last week that it is legal for federal agencies to feed TV stations prepackaged news stories that do not disclose the government’s role in producing them.

That message, in memos sent Friday to federal agency heads and general counsels, contradicts a Feb. 17 memo from Comptroller General David M. Walker. Walker wrote that such stories — designed to resemble independently reported broadcast news stories so that TV stations can run them without editing — violate provisions in annual appropriations laws that ban covert propaganda.\

Now, the administration has spent $254 million to produce “news stories” that can be run on TV. (essentially equivalent to the $300 million promised for Tsunami relief. Priorities?). These include actors posing as reporters, and are indistiguishable from actual, independent, news stories. If these are __not__ propaganda pieces, then why pretend that they are actual news stories? It is apparently not enough that conservative commentators are on the government payroll without disclosing it. Now we need to use the real news services to promote the government’s position, at taxpayer’s expense.

If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.