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Edited on Sat Feb-19-05 07:44 PM by JackD76
I don't know how to post links so I will post the whole stories.
********************** STORY 1 About Gannon.* **********************
CBS Speculates That Karl Rove Was Jeff Gannon's Contact Inside the White House; Retitles Article to Highlight Gannongate Element
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By ADVOCATE STAFF
In a stunning development -- which The Advocate can't help but feel is related to the revelation last fall that Karl Rove was possibly behind Rathergate and (therefore) CBS News's recent decline -- CBS News has gone out on a limb and made it clear that it suspects Karl Rove to be Jeff Gannon's White House Contact. The article, originally titled "Karl Rove's Warning to GOP," has just now been renamed, in the last few minutes, "Rove-Gannon Connection?" to emphasis that aspect of the story (which is not solely about Jeff Gannon) most relevant to the Gannongate scandal.
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According to the article,
hen Jeff Gannon, White House "reporter" for Talon "News," was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable. Gannon says that he met Rove only once, at a White House Christmas party, and Gannon is kind of small potatoes for Rove at this point in his career.
But Rove's dominance of White House and Republican politics, Gannon's aggressively partisan work and the ease with which he got day passes for the White House press room the past two years make it hard to believe that he wasn't at least implicitly sanctioned by the "boy genius." Rove, who rarely gave on-the-record interviews to the MSM (mainstream media), had time to talk to GOPUSA, which owns Talon.
The CBS theory would seem to fit, given recent revelations from Editor & Publisher and Raw Story that "Jeff Gannon" had a long history of bragging -- both to fellow journalists and even publicly, at the Free Republic website -- about his ability to get important news stories before anyone else had them.
One of the stories he bragged about having first, according to Raw Story, related to the so-called Rathergate (or Memogate) affair -- which dovetails nicely with the first sentence in this article.
****************************** STORY 2 WARNING FROM CONGRESS* ******************************
Agencies Warned About Fake News Videos
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Congressional investigators warned federal agencies this week that the promotion of government policies through video news releases meant to look like TV news stories may violate federal rules against propaganda.
In a letter sent Thursday to heads of government departments and agencies, the Government Accountability Office noted that "prepackaged news stories have become common tools of the public relations industry."
The presentations "are intended to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public by independent television news organizations," the letter said.
Comptroller General David M. Walker warned that such productions may violate a government prohibition, enacted in 1951, against the use of appropriated funds for propaganda.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy was criticized last year for a series of video news releases in which a narrator, sometimes identified as "Karen Ryan" or "Mike Morris," said she or he was "reporting" on the office's activities. The tapes were sent to local television stations for use in news programs.
In a second case criticized by the GAO last year, the Health and Human Services Department's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services produced video news releases touting changes to Medicare. Those productions were also narrated by "Karen Ryan" and were offered to local TV news operations.
In both cases, Walker wrote Thursday, "television-viewing audiences did not know that stories they watched on television news programs about the government were, in fact, prepared by the government. We concluded that those prepackaged news stories violated the publicity or propaganda prohibition."
The GAO letter did say video news releases could be used without violating the law if it was clearly disclosed to the viewing audience that the material was prepared by the government.
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