The Champaign-based sister station of WCFN-TV
(Channel 49), which will begin airing a half-hour news broadcast in
the Springfield market next month, was singled out in a New York Times story
this week for advancing what some experts consider government-sponsored
propaganda.
The Bush administration’s efforts to
promote its agendas through media manipulation came to a head
recently with the discovery that several right-wing commentators
had received payments for touting federal policies. Most notably,
syndicated pundit Armstrong Williams collected $240,000 from the
Education Department to hype the Bush administration’s No
Child Left Behind Act.
Although Bush has since sworn off such practices, the White House this week defended its
production and distribution of government-made video news releases.
A Bush spokesman confirmed on Monday that the
administration would ignore recent opinions by the Government
Accountability Office that deemed such news segments covert
propaganda.
Several hundreds of these news segments were broadcast on local stations across the
country, often without the revelation of their source. In the segments,
phony reporters and rehearsed interviews with top officials are used to
champion Bush policies.
“The Bush administration’s use of
taxpayer-financed propaganda against U.S. citizens is a serious
matter, made all the more troubling by the fact that local
television stations were apparently complicit in it,” says
Jamison Foser, senior adviser at Media Matters for America.
During the last three months, Champaign-based
WCIA (Channel 3) aired 26 news segments made by the U.S. Department
of Agriculture, according to a front-page report in the Sunday,
March 13, edition of the Times.
In the article, WCIA is characterized as an
understaffed news station that uses the federal reports to beef up
its programming and intentionally misleads viewers by
“implying that the segments are the work of WCIA
reporters.”
Jim Gee, the station’s news director,
defended the use of government-made reports, saying, “We
don’t think they’re propaganda. They meet our
journalistic standards.”
Reached by Illinois
Times, Gee, who will also serve as
news director for WCFN, declined comment on the station’s
reliance on prepackaged video news releases.
“As far as the article in the Times is
concerned, it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie,” Gee
says, adding that the station has received no complaints from
viewers.
Russ Hamilton, the stations’ vice
president and general manager, says that the issue “has been
blown out of proportion” but adds that he may curb the airing
of such reports in the future.
WCIA and WCFN are owned by Texas-based
Nexstar Broadcasting Group, which has a stake in 46 television
stations in nearly a dozen states.
WCFN Primetime News at Nine, a live half-hour news broadcast, will debut on April 7
and air at 9 o’clock each weeknight.
Sinclair Broadcast Group, the parent company
of Springfield’s WICS (Channel 20), employed Armstrong
Williams while he was being paid by the Bush administration and
aired Armstrong’s four-part interview of Vice President Dick
Cheney in 2003, identifying the columnist as a “News Central
analyst.”
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2005.
