Issue #27/82, February 1 - 10, 2000 
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by Matt Taibbi
I'm beginning to wonder what the Washington Post will do when the United States government announces a plan to euthanize the nation's handicapped in order to spare taxpayers the expense of paying for handicapped access...
"Admittedly, the handicapped are a great strain on the budget, and they are undeniably unpleasant to look at," the paper will comment-- before grimly agreeing that "the government's plan does nonetheless seem politically inexpedient and bound to needlessly stir up public emotions when other solutions may yet be available."
Or maybe the paper will have this to say, when the FBI decides to place land mines under sidewalks and elementary school playgrounds in the ghettos of large cities as a drug-prevention measure:
"The fact that law enforcement authorities have been moved to take such seemingly extreme measures is itself a cruel commentary on the desperate state of affairs in the war against illicit drug consumption."
A joke? Satire by hyperbole? Not if one of the Post's latest actual real-life editorials is any guide. In that editorial, the paper apologized for the government no less than three times as part of its response to news that the White House had coerced private television networks into placing anti-drug messages in their entertainment programming.
that's right: when confronted with the news that the executive branch of the U.S. government had tried (and succeeded, incidentally!) to make George Orwell's 1984 a reality in America, one of the country's two great "papers of record" basically repeated the same feeble government-friendly line it took with Vietnam--that it was an initiative borne of good intentions, only badly and somewhat improperly executed.
The January 15 editorial is the paper's only response so far to a highly shocking story which first broke on the online magazine Salon.com last week. The magazine reported that the Office for National Drug Control Policy, an arm of the White House, had first forced networks to sell huge chunks of airtime to the government at half cost. Theoretically, that airtime was to be used for government-produced anti-drug public service announcements, announcements for which funding had already been approved by Congress.
But the ONDCP did not use the time to run its own ads; instead, it "gave" that airtime back to the networks on the condition that the stations place anti-drug ads in their entertainment programs--shows like "E.R." According to the magazine, the deals weren't finalized until the White House was shown the scripts for the shows and convinced that the "messages" that had been inserted were worth the asking price.
In essence, if you can grasp this, the White House was editing the content of sitcoms and hospital shows. It is a story that should be terrifying to any American still in possession of any illusions whatsoever about the extent of his inherent rights and liberties. The very idea that the government might be not only censoring but actively altering the content of our private entertainment is an anathema to our most basic values--a glaringly obvious violation, without being too dramatic, of the fundamental constitutional guarantee to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" outside of government control. Jefferson would die all over again in shrieking agony if he were raised from the grave to be informed of this story.
What's more, if President Clinton approved the plan, it is almost certainly an impeachable offense from a merely legal standpoint, as the ONDCP's plan seems to have clearly violated the so-called "payola" laws which force TV networks to inform viewers when their programming is sponsored by political organizations.
Put another way, whoever it was in the government who thought up this idea and carried it out (and the ONDCP has already admitted to the program's existence) should not only be prosecuted, but should probably be moved to the top of the list of candidates for the country's first televised executions, if and when they take place. If President Clinton knew about this, he should be removed from office, and I mean immediately. Either that, or we should organize a public plebiscite to formally ratify our transformation into a new nation, as this sort of thing simply does not happen in the United States. In communist Russia, maybe, in Idi Amin's Uganda, maybe, but not the United States.
So what does the Washington Post, that great beacon of free speech and press freedom, have to say about the issue? Not much; 359 words, to be exact. And unbelievably, of those 359 words, a full 132 are spent apologizing on behalf of the government. What's more, the strongest adjective the paper uses to describe the program is "disquieting". I shit you not-- "disquieting". With words like "criminal", "unconstitutional", "repulsive", "horrifying" and countless others around for perfectly appropriate application to this topic, the best the Post could come up with is "disquieting". The editorial starts off gently, announcing its position in such an oblique way that it is hard to tell, at first, that they are coming out against the program:
"IN OFFERING television networks financial incentives to toe the White House's anti-drug line, the Office of National Drug Control Policy co-opts ostensibly independent broadcasters for propaganda purposes-- and the broadcasters let themselves be co-opted. The arrangement is all the more disquieting for having been largely unknown-- though not really a secret-- until its existence was reported Thursday by the online magazine Salon."
The Post here is, in its own words, providing a sneak preview of part of the White House's defense on this matter, namely that this program was not a secret, and therefore not a scandal (as no scandals are not first secrets). In subsequent news articles on the AP wire, government spokesmen would dismiss the story by noting that ONDCP director Barry McCaffrey had written about the arrangement in the New York Daily News two years ago-- as though that made it all right.
In any case, from there, the paper moves into an unabashed apology for the government some twenty words longer than its tame lead paragraph. Amazingly, it justifies in a general way the President's right to use the "bully pulpit" to propagandize state policies:
"This is not to say the government has no role in promoting an anti-drug message. To the contrary, if the president wishes to use his bully pulpit to urge Hollywood not to glorify drug use, more power to him. Indeed, that was precisely the purpose of the law that gave rise to this peculiar arrangement. The drug policy director's office was authorized to buy $1 billion in anti-drug advertising over five years, with the networks providing, in effect, two minutes of time for every minute the government buys."
The paper then moves into the meat of its "denunciation" of the ONDCP initiative. Note the unaccountably calm, academic tone of this passage. Amazingly, the editorial goes on to compare the government propaganda program to the nauseating but absolutely legal practice of product placement in movies:
"Where the White House goes too far is in providing a direct and significant financial inducement to the networks to weave the government's anti-drug message into network programming... This puts government in the position of assessing how on-message the networks really are and networks in the position of increasing their profit if they satisfy the White House script reviewers. Unlike viewers of anti-drug ads, viewers of these programs don't know that they are receiving government-sponsored political messages. It's kind of like commercial product placement-- only the product is White House spin."
Look, I think "Lost World" and the new Bond movies sucked, too, but there's simply no comparing cinema product placement with an ambitious program of government censorship in a nation founded on the principle that such things must and should be impossible. The comparison is thoroughly misleading and disgustingly inappropriate. It reduces the story to an issue of tactics and taste, when the paper should be talking about violations of fundamental tenets of our system. You almost wonder why they'd couch the issue this way, until you get to the last paragraph:
"In this case, we happen to agree with the spin, and the idea of sitcoms and television dramas carrying anti-drug themes seems healthy. But where does it end? Could the government pay the networks to slip idle comments into 'ER' about the virtues of a particular health care policy? There is nothing wrong with government's promoting a message-- it happens all the time and often with good cause-- but people have a right to know when they are being propagandized."
"We agree with the spin... "Nothing wrong"... "Good cause"... Imagine sticking these phrases into a discussion of this issue! The Post could only put them there as part of a conscious deception of its readers, for the paper's editors surely know: the efficacy of the anti-drug movement has absolutely nothing to do with this story, and everything to do with abuse of power. THIS STORY IS NOT ABOUT DRUGS. This is a coup d'etat. And what The Post editorial didn't tell you-- didn't scream it in big capital letters-- is that if you value your freedoms at all, organize immediately, in any way you can, to force a criminal prosecution of this issue. But I warn you in advance-- you're outnumbered. Powerful institutions like the Washington Post are not on your side. By not calling for action-- and the Post doesn't even come close to doing so in this editorial-- they're telling us that they want this to go away. And if something like this can go away, it seems to me that all is lost.
Watch this story. I guarantee you it will die quickly in the mass-market media. It has already gone a day without mention in the New York Times (which did not even bother with an editorial, incidentally) and the Washington Post. Three decades ago, the Post took a similar
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If you are interested in taking part in a movement to try force a prosecution of this issue, please write to:
