Public Relations Disaster Management
Though time will certainly tell, the Bush administration so far has not yet surpassed that of Richard Nixon’s in its contempt for a free press and its unrelenting war on the truth. Its latest miscarriage of misinformation-a fake “press conference” run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to update the country on the California wildfires-doesn’t match Nixon’s inclusion of disfavored journalists on an “enemies list” to be targeted with wiretaps and tax audits.
Yet the FEMA fiasco does fit in neatly with the Bush pattern of duplicity, secrecy and possible lawbreaking in its public relations. And it works. That is, until someone catches them in the act.
In this case, as fires consumed thousands of homes in Southern California, left hundreds of thousands homeless and at least seven dead, FEMA officials-eager not to convey information but to burnish the blackened image the agency earned with its response to Hurricane Katrina-decided to call what it billed as a news conference. But it gave actual reporters too little time to get to the event, and set them up instead on a telephone conference line on which they could listen but were barred from asking questions.
The queries instead came from FEMA employees, who offered such piercing inquiries as this: “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?” To which FEMA Deputy Administrator Harvey E. Johnson replied: “I’m very happy with FEMA’s response so far.”
The phony news conference was carried live on some cable television news stations, complete with the official trappings-the podium, the FEMA seal used as a backdrop. A sign-language interpreter gestured diligently as Johnson spoke. The sham would probably have worked if not for The Washington Post, which exposed the agency a few days after the faux news conference was held.
It has now been roundly condemned by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and White House press secretary Dana Perino, who assures us that of course, fake news conferences are “not a practice that we would employ here at the White House.”
And you want to believe her. If only the facts did not get in the way.
This is no isolated incident but only the latest in a series of scandals involving the Bush administration and its manufacturing of “news.” Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office found that the administration had violated a law against “covert propaganda” by paying conservative commentator Armstrong Williams to praise the No Child Left Behind Act in his columns and television appearances. The GAO also said the law was broken when the administration used public funds to pay a public relations company to analyze the media to determine if it carried the message: “The Bush administration/the GOP is committed to education.”
Government money also was used to produce prepackaged video “news releases” featuring a phony reporter who praised both the Bush education policies and the Medicare drug benefit. Some news stations used the videos without disclosing they were produced by the government.
Like its forerunners, the FEMA fakery isn’t just spin but something worse. It’s government-sponsored propaganda. When the Chinese and other global miscreants practice it, we condemn it. When the Bush administration does it, it seems to blend into the background of disinformation and outright untruths that have damaged the president’s credibility at home and, more ominously, overseas.
Even now, an army of administration officials and their allies in the conservative media are recklessly promoting the idea that the United States and indeed, the world, have almost no choice but to bomb Iran for its presumed pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities. The drumbeat is an eerie reprise of the run-up to the Iraq invasion, when anyone who countered the administration’s apocalyptic vision of a “mushroom cloud” originating from Baghdad was vilified as a hapless wimp, or worse, a terrorist sympathizer.
While its ramifications are not nearly so dire, the FEMA imbroglio shares this hallmark with so many other Bush administration media gambits: It reveals a complete insensitivity to the dangers and devastating losses experienced by the people directly touched by tragedy. Thousands of Southern Californians are experiencing an unimaginable upheaval. They’ve lost their homes, their businesses, their jobs, their neighborhoods.
The reality of this loss is itself discredited by FEMA’s phoniness, and this arrogant agency has again discredited itself.
© 2007 Washington Post Writers Group
Even though Dana Perino jumped out to condemn the FEMA stunt, I still gotta think she loved it and would love to make it happen time and again, if they could just figure out how not to get caught at it.
It’s strikingly weird that in an article about the latest bit of the Bush admin’s ‘War Against Truth,’ the first paragraph is devoted to arguing that “it’s not as bad as it was under Nixon.” I doubt that assertion is true, & wonder why Cocco even bothered to stick it in there.
Valerie Plame Wilson said in an interview recently she thought the White House treatment of her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was a dry run for the ‘Swiftboating’ of John Kerry.
I hope the FEMA ‘reporters’ aren’t planning an Orson Welles style “War of the Worlds” experience for us on Halloween night.
PR disaster? No problem, they ARE the media.
Maybe Marie and I disagree. I think my government’s constant deceptions are even worse than Nixon’s enemy list. As if this republican administration hasn’t had it’s own (using whistleblowers for target practice)list.
Douglas Feith and the Office of Special Plans (after it was exposed they tried changing it’s name which actually worked pretty well. Very Orwellian that.) established by Rumsfeld in the Pentagon with a pipeline to the Administration… lied us into an unjust war characterized by corruption.
Besides Nixon was smarter and well what would Barry Goldwater have had to say about Cheney’s creating a throne and Bush shredding our constitution?
This Administration is a true catastrophe for America. Very well likely to be the very worst we have ever had despite their modernity …or because of it. It wasn’t quite an accident that first they took the money… it was only sometime later that we could see how direly inept they were… and it is only now that we realize just how much they really don’t care about either.
Lest we forget, how about coaching the soldiers in 2005 and Jeff Gannon, the fake White House reporter - all part of Bush’s Potemkin Village.
“…doesn’t match Nixon’s inclusion of disfavored journalists on an “enemies list” to be targeted with wiretaps and tax audits.”
Really? Did Nixon have a secret No Fly List which includes Sen. Kennedy, Al Gore, nuns, Quakers, and a wide variety of, er, administration “critics,” another Terror Watch List with over 750,000 names on it - and no way to learn why one is on one of the lists, or how to get off of it? Did Nixon illegally wiretap millions for over seven years without any oversight whatsoever? Did Nixon use National Security Letters hundreds of thousands of times to illegally gather information while simultaneously stripping all Letter recipients of their Constitutional right to free speech? Did Nixon shift as much wealth as possible into the hands of his insanely greedy “friends?”
Nixon was an amateur.
I caught a redundancy overlooked by Marie’s editors: “conservative media.”
Remember Jeff Guckert-Gannon, the male escort plant in Bushconferences, oh, three years ago? Ah, but I see chazbo has already mentioned him . . .
Or the press conference where the Smirk selected a FOXist to ask the question that he’d been assigned to ask?
Worse is — the majority of “reporters” needed no urging & no coaching to rah-rah for the Smirk for six whole years.
Nobody has mentioned so far the “video news releases” pumped out by various corporations for the local news programs all over the country. These are actually public relations advertising disguised as news reports. These are sent out as a complete package with introductions and tag lines so that local stations can pretend that it is some affiliate reporter filing the story.
It would appear that with shill reporters asking patty-cake softball questions that federal agencies are heading in the same direction. The next time you wonder at the petty and banal stupidity of Charley Rose or the spinelessness of the Snoozehour with Jim Lehrer, take a look at their underwriting patrons usually displayed at the beginning and end of each program. Ditto for All Things Considered, Diane Rehm, and Morning Edition.
Amy Goodman and Democracy Now did an excellent report on this practice which you can view at:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/06/1432239&mode=thread&tid=25
The media is controled by corporate interests who are not at all interested in the truth. They want a compliant audience who doesn’t question anything that they read or hear.
Hoa binh
Too bad the author hit the soft-pedal with the Nixon comment.
If there’s such a thing as “damning with faint praise,” there’s also such a thing as “absolution through faint condemnation.” Like saying “Hitler was a certainly a little rude to the Jews.”
FEMA is the one shoving the NIMS (National Incident Management System) down everybody’s throat, too. Great. Just the guys I trust when it comes to handling emergencies. I mean, they did SO well with Katrina…..
Liberty & Justice,
SJ
www.spartacusjones.com