Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
American school kids are being subjected to "news" programs that contain covert government-sponsored anti-drug messages.
Aug 8, 2001 | Channel One, the company that beams TV news programs and commercials into thousands of schools in the United States, has broadcast dozens of news segments that contained anti-drug messages in the past three years -- and received millions of dollars' worth of ad credits from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy for doing so, Salon has learned.
The arrangement, in which taxpayers' money was used to underwrite a covert anti-drug message shown to millions of schoolchildren in the guise of a supposedly objective news program, appeared to violate the ONDCP's publicly stated policy that news and editorial pieces would not be eligible for the ad credit program.
Documents obtained by Salon explaining why some news segments were accepted and others rejected last year shed light on the process by which a media company and a law enforcement branch of the U.S. government came to a mutually satisfactory understanding over the monetary value of news programs.
According to Cornelia Pechmann, a marketing expert who was hired by the ONDCP to evaluate whether stories or segments were sufficiently "on message" to receive ad credits, of 10 news segments Channel One submitted for approval from August 2000 to January 2001, only one was approved. However, during the second half of the school year, from February to May 2001, Pechmann approved seven of the 11 stories Channel One submitted. Salon has obtained an evaluation sheet rejecting nine of 10 segments for the year's first half, as well as tapes of several of the later submissions that were approved. The rejected segments were turned down because they were too general, too equivocal in their stance and/or did not contain sufficiently explicit anti-drug messages. The accepted segments were much more narrowly focused and contained unequivocal anti-drug messages.
Channel One refused comment despite numerous calls to its president, Jim Ritts, and to Tom Rogers, the chairman of its parent company, Primedia. The ONDCP and the White House also declined to comment.
But critics of the ONDCP's controversial advertising program (which gained national notoriety when Salon revealed that TV networks had turned scripts of prime-time shows with anti-drug messages over to the ONDCP for vetting, in hopes of gaining cash credit) were quick to condemn the arrangement.
Kevin Zeese, president of the advocacy group Common Sense for Drug Policy, saw the dramatic increase in the number of segments that Channel One got approved for matching credit as evidence that "they know what tune to play to get the government's money. I suspect it was a conscious decision to warp their reporting to satisfy the government's requirements."
"ONDCP is treading dangerous waters," said Kathryn Montgomery, president of the Center for Media Education, criticizing Channel One for lacking journalistic integrity. "The government shouldn't be let off the hook either, for its participation in undermining the integrity of the news," Montgomery said. "Maybe we should haul Channel One before the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive marketing practices in calling itself news. They bill themselves as news and clearly everything is for sale."
In addition to Channel One, Pechmann told Salon, she assessed TV shows from NBC, Fox (including two television movies), CBS, the Family Channel, the WB, Arts & Entertainment, Lifetime and the E! Network, and articles from Teen Newsweek, Girls Life and Scouting. She said she also evaluated "documentaries and biographies," but didn't specify what network they appeared on.
Pechmann said she also received more than one submission for evaluation from the New York Times, including a news article published last November reporting on a town meeting about youth drug use. Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for the Times, acknowledged that a Times salesperson working on the ONDCP account had submitted the articles, but stated that the employee, who she said was acting on his or her own initiative, had done so in error and had been instructed not to do so again. She declined to name the employee. In an e-mail, Mathis wrote that "it was the Times's practice to only submit advertising" to the ONDCP, not news articles or features, and that the salesperson, "unaware of our practice, erroneously submitted articles." Mathis confirmed that more than one article was submitted, but declined to say how many.
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