The Bush administration and Republican Congress have a few problems on their hands right now. They include, for a brief, incomplete list: (1) DeLay's Texas indictment last week on campaign financing violations and today on money laundering charges; (2) Bush's right hand man Rove and Cheney's right hand man Libby involved in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame--and White House statements that turn out not to have been entirely truthful about it; (3) Bush's incompetent crony managers at FEMA and Homeland Security bungling one of the most important government functions--coming to the aide of citizens in distress; (4) FEMA's spending $200 million to buy ice and pay truckers to drive it everywhere in the country imaginable except to New Orleans where it was needed to save lives and prevent misery; (5) Frist's investigation for insider trading in his decision to sell his HCA stock (which he claimed two years ago he didn't know he owned) just months before bad news caused the price to go down; (6) Republican Pombo's assault on the Endangered Species Act; (7) more information about military condoning of abuse at Guantanamo and the refusal of military brass even to investigate it; (8) Republican plans to go forward with more tax cuts for the wealthy and more benefit cuts for the poor even while Katrina and Rita will add hundreds of billions to the cost of the government and the Iraq war continues to cost $60 - $100 billion a year indefinitely into the future; (9) the disaster that is Iraq, where generals tell Congress things are not going very well but tell the public on the Sunday news programs that things are looking up; and the response of the American people in the form of an anti-war demonstration in DC that gathered a crowd of hundreds of thousands of protestors calling for Bush to bring the troops home now; (10) a Republican Congress that thinks "free market" means a free-for-all for oil companies to get one subsidy after another even when they are making record profits; (11) a Republican Congress that sees Katrina as just another excuse to carry out its agenda on the American environment by letting oil rigs tear up the fragile offshore ocean shelves and the even more fragile Arctic tundra; and (12) a FEMA agency and military that think "free market" means giving away contracts to companies in no-bid processes and then letting the companies rip off the government with huge prices for doing a job that doesn't need to be done (like the private securities guards that are being paid to patrol the streets of New Orleans, even though there are soldiers and National Guardsmen there, or the private security outfits that are not even under the control of the military in Iraq, that the Iraqi people say have killed Iraqi civilians without provocation).
Whatever one's political leanings, these stories are each significant and deserve adequate informational coverage in the news media. Yet many Americans could go through an entire week without hearing much about these stories, because they are not very well covered in the national media.
As noted in an earlier post, the anti-war protest hardly made it into national newspapers, and garnered about 30 seconds on CNN's news for the weekend of the protests themselves. There was more coverage of the puny 400 pro-war protestors that showed on Monday a week ago than there was of the hundreds of thousands who came to put voice to the American people's majority-held views about this illegitimate war in which American troops' and Iraqis' blood continues to be shed. A best, a few journalists are beginning to talk frankly about the quaqmire in Iraq. One of them was Andy Rooney on Sunday's Sixty Minutes. Why isn't there more of that kind of honest talk on television programs across the country?
The media have not done very well at following through on their aggressive reporting about the FEMA and Homeland Security bungling. The New York Times did carry a story about ice on "Trips to Nowhere" Sunday that traced the routes of truck drivers hired by FEMA (and paid $200 million) to deliver ice to disaster areas. The trouble is, of course, that FEMA couldn't even get its act together well enough to have the drivers actually deliver the ice where it was needed. Refrigerator trucks were left standing on tarmac and running their freezers for days on end, using up precious energy and failing to deliver ice. Most of it was apparently sent back into storage in some FEMA warehouse or other. Precious little made it to the people that desperately needed it. Why isn't there more of this kind of investigative journalism in papers and on television channels across the country?
If you watch CNN or Fox News, you also might be forgiven for concluding that the Plame story is just old news (or no news at all). When Judith Miller was released from jail to testify about her conversations with Cheney's aide in the days before Novak's outing of Plame, there was a good bit of curiousity why Miller felt she needed a personal waiver, given the written waiver received long ago (although apparently with Libby's statement that signing the waiver was necessary to maintain employment in the White House), but little speculation about why Libby should have been talking with reporters about CIA personnel. We now know that both Bush strategist Karl Rove and Cheney right hand man Libby spoke with reporters about Valerie Plame. Ask yourself. What reason would a White House have for raising an issue that seems damaging for a government official? About the only reason that comes to mind for Rove and Libby to discuss Wilson and Plame is to get even. Where are the investigative reporters pursuing that story and trying to find just how closely those tentacles are woven around the White House and even the man who occupies the seat of the President of the United States?
The Government Accountability Office also just came out with a scathing report condemning the Bush administration's use of taxpayer dollars for partisan purposes, as reported in the Times.
"Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.
In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban." (emphasis added)
Specifically, the GAO noted that the Bush administration looked to see whether news coverage consistently gave the message that the administration and the GOP cared about education. The finding comes with no penalty, other than the requirement to report the violation to Congress and to the White House.
The Bush administration's counsels defended the process of using paid reporters as within the law because taxpayer money was only used to disseminate factual information. The GAO easily squelched that argument by noting that nothing is more important to factual accuracy than accurate attribution of statements. Remember that in one of the video feeds on the education law, the hired actress gives the government an A for its education work. Would the White House have us think that was a "fact" and so not propaganda? The story about the GAO report, like most other hard-hitting stories that deserve to be focused on in every major news outlet, hardly caused a ripple across CNN and Fox News and other outlets.
The media apparently think Americans will quickly forget as newsworthy items are drowned in the froth of the latest sensational rape or murder. We have to hope they are wrong.