The Propaganda Pandemic and George Will's Hypocrisy
When I first saw George Will’s column last week (published as “Conservatives in Fake News Business” in my local newspaper), I initially hoped to finally read a conservative denunciation of the Fox/Sinclair/ClearChannel axis of error. That wish went unfulfilled, but I was treated to the rare and refreshing sight of a prominent conservative columnist writing about the Bush administration’s propaganda machine.
Will identified four separate instances where the federal government was misused to disseminate partisan propaganda: a $240,000 payment to Armstrong Williams for pumping up Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” Health & Human Services’ fake news videos about the Medicare prescription drug plan, the administration threatening Medicare’s actuary not to reveal the program’s real cost until it was too late, and more “fake news videos” from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Curiously, Will skipped over several other examples: the IRS trumpeting W’s destructive top-heavy tax cuts, Social Security employees shilling for his proposed private account scheme, soldiers in Iraq being supplied with wallet cards of GOP talking points, and Congress promoting skewed history via a “Republican Freedom Calendar.”
It’s quite interesting that Will is (rhetorically, at least) a staunch opponent of propaganda, after participating in so much of it during his long career as a pundit. As detailed by Steve Rendell in his article “The Hypocrisy of George Will,” Will took both sides of the Senate filibuster issue (each time favoring the GOP); denigrated Jesse Jackson for his ignorance of policy issues and later excused W for the same; coached Reagan for a debate with materials stolen from Carter’s staff; gave Bush II interview questions before airtime; and scorned Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair while not mentioning his own.
Thanks for reading.
Quote of the Day:
“The men who do iniquity in the name of patriotism, of reform, of Americanism, are merely one small division of the class that has always existed and will always exist,- the class of hypocrites and demagogues, the class that is always prompt to steal the watchwords of righteousness and use them in the interests of evil-doing.”Theodore Roosevelt (“True Americanism,” The Forum Magazine, April 1894)