Frank Rich of the New York Times has an interesting piece about the propagandists employed by the White House. Go ahead and register for the Times. It’s painless and free.

I keep harping on the propaganda aspect of the Jeff Gannon affair. Frank Rich harps on that, but he goes further and adds 5 other fake journalists employed by the White House or the Republican machine.

I truly hope the People will begin to become aware of the propaganda and reject it, whether it’s from the Left or the Right.

(By the way, for some Left Wing propaganda critique, see my post about a presentation by Author Michael Crichton on the issue of propaganda by the environmental movement.)

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: The White House Stages Its ‘Daily Show’: “By my count, ‘Jeff Gannon’ is now at least the sixth ‘journalist’ (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration’s ‘marriage’ initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They starred in bogus reports (’In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting,’ went the script) pretending to ’sort through the details’ of the administration’s Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such ‘reports,’ some of which found their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal ‘covert propaganda’ by the Government Accountability Office.”