Propaganda

We know from Scott McClellan, the former White House Spokesman, in his recent book, What Happened, that President Bush insists on discipline in messaging. Although the publics on both sides of the Atlantic have gotten to the point of heavily discounting what he says, the President's desire for control can give us a sense of the thrust of policy. This is certainly true with respect to Iran.

As Paul Schmelzer wrote on the Minnesota Independent website, "There were two National Conferences on Media Reform in Minneapolis over the weekend: the one I attended and the one Bill O'Reilly, Juan Williams and Fox News talking head Mary Catherine Ham didn't."

O'Reilly's show tried to manufacture controversy about the conference, which I and others from the Center for Media and Democracy attended. But before addressing that, how about some real news on a genuinely controversial issue?

During Sunday's closing plenary, FCC Commissioner and fake news foe Jonathan Adelstein pledged to push for multiple thorough investigations of the Pentagon military analyst program. So far, the Pentagon's Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, have launched inquiries into the Defense Department's secret cultivation of military pundits. But those investigations aren't enough.