The Bush administration undermines the democracy it purports to be building in Iraq when it trashes the principles of a free press. Reports in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times on how the US government pays Iraqi journalists to write, and newspapers to publish, pro-American pieces without naming the source, expose an ethical breach stunning in its callous disregard for the truth.

Then again, maybe it shouldn't be so stunning, given that the Bush administration has disdained open journalistic inquiry since its earliest days and has used the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war to claim national security as an excuse for secrecy and the foisting of propaganda on US citizens.

This year the Government Accountability Office found that the Education Department engaged in illegal ''covert propaganda" when it hired conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, paying him $240,000 to promote the ''No Child Left Behind" law on his radio and TV programs.

The White House also provided media credentials to Jeff Gannon, a conservative blogger with little journalistic training, to ask softball pro-Bush questions at news briefings.

While Washington politics might be considered one big propaganda machine in its promotion of various agendas, most players -- and the public -- know the difference between spin and deception. Having someone masquerading as a reporter or pretending to do an interview is deceit.

Paying to have US government-written ''news stories" published in the Iraqi press takes deceit to a new level. The LA Times reported that some newspapers ran the pro-US pieces along with, and indistinguishable from, their own accounts of the war. Other papers labeled the pieces ''advertising" but did not say where they originated.

The Los Angeles paper reported that publications were paid as much as $1,500 for running stories that had been translated into Arabic by the Lincoln Group, a Washington public relations agency that has a contract with the Pentagon. The New York Times reported that Iraqi journalists were paid to write stories, and that stories written by US troops included copyrighted material without attribution. One story, which lifted paragraphs whole from an Arabic newspaper in London, omitted a quote critical of American reconstruction in Iraq.

The bruising irony of these pathetic efforts, of course, is that Bush claims he is attempting to export democracy at the same time that his administration is corrupting the news, making a mockery of the free press that is a cornerstone of democracy. These are the tactics not of a free society but of tyrants such as the one Bush deposed in the name of freedom.

© 2005 The Boston Globe