Hightower Lowdown
"You can put earrings on a hog, but it won't hide the ugliness." -- Jim Hightower
In This Issue
The USDA's denial of problems with our beef supply is just plain crazy!
December's Lowdown
The many REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL after Election Day 2008
After casting her ballot for Barack Obama, Amanda Jones said simply, "I feel good about voting for him." Ms. Jones, of Cedar Creek, Texas (a town just south of Austin), is African-American, and what gives her vote some historic punch is that she's 109 years old. Her father was a slave. Her mother was born right after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. She's been through it all--Jim Crow segregation, women's suffrage, the Great Depression, the poll tax, FDR, the civil-rights movement, desegregation, 13 years of George W (five as guv, eight as prez), and now: Barack Obama. This last change fills her with joy, she says.
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Government scripted "news"
What if you saw a news report on your local television station, then later you learned that the report had actually been written by the federal government and that the "reporter" had been hired by the government to read the government- written script? Nonsense, you'd say, this isn't the Soviet Union. We don't allow government-scripted news in America!
No? Well, maybe you've seen some recent news reports touting the benefits of George W's new prescription-drug law for Medicare patients. Some of these segments show Bush signing the law and getting a standing ovation from those watching. One shows a pharmacist explaining the program to an elderly customer. "It sounds like a good idea," says the customer. "A very good idea," responds the pharmacist. Talk about puff pieces!
Nowhere is it mentioned that Bush's law is an exorbitantly expensive program that will benefit drug-company gougers more than senior citizens, or that the Bushites lied about the price tag to get it through Congress. That's because this news bite was produced and distributed to TV stations nationwide by Bush's own Department of Health and Human Services.
Your tax dollars at work! The agency will spend some $50 million this year on its advertising campaign to glorify the program.
These "news packages" are called VNRs—video news releases—and they've been used for some time by corporations. Now our government is also spoon-feeding "news" to TV stations, which don't bother to identify the source of these packaged stories.
To help stop this dangerous combo of government propaganda and journalistic fraud, call the Committee for Concerned Journalists: 202-293-7394.