An American Pravda

Image Credit: Sonya via Flickr and Creative Commons.

An American Pravda

On Friday, July 25, 2008 a revealing and disturbing dialogue took place on MSNBC's Hardball. Scott McClellan, the former White House Press Secretary, clearly and repeatedly stated that the White House had methodically, deliberately, and covertly used sympathetic media figures - and in particular Fox News - to articulate Administration talking points in the national media. McClellan suggests that the Bush Administration has made a practice of feeding issues and prepared opinions to pundits and opinion leaders in the media thereby deputizing them into a network of ad hoc spokespeople for the White House.

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From Comment Thread on Newsvine:

Just so we're clear, yes, this is illegal. The Bush Administration is patently not allowed to use a private media organization as a propaganda mouthpiece. Ignoring that and the entire impeachment discussion for a moment in favor of a larger question: why hast this story all but disappeared off of the political radar?

The left-wing blogs are still talking about it, though few are really offering much in the way of cogent analysis, but beyond that -- silence. This is a major cable news network more or less being labeled a government toady and one that has a long and storied record of bending the facts to suit a partisan bias.

I know we're not surprised by this, but shouldn't we be outraged? Shouldn't we be talking about it? Shouldn't this be important to us?