Buying of News Ruled Illegal

Today's NY Times reports that federal auditors have ruled that Soviet-style propaganda is illegal:

"Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party. In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban."

I exaggerate a little. Soviet-style propaganda is outright ownership of the media, which then promptly disseminates news friendly to the government. The closest the Bush admin comes to that is Fox News, but that's more like having a loud groupie. Producing shows disguised as news, and paying what appear to be disinterested commentators to tout your schtick, is actually even more deceitful then what the Soviets were doing, since pretty much everybody in the Soviet Union knew what the government was up to whereas us lay folk here in the US merely assumed that our government doesn't peddle it's agenda to us as news. As far as Bush administration outrages go, this one is pretty low on the scale, being more stupid then malicious.

UPDATE: The Washington Post says that the GAO found nothing illegal about conservative commentator Maggie Gallagher's paid involvement in the marriage iniatives put forth by Health and Human Services. Of course there's also nothing illegal about her not telling her audience of her involvement while she was talking up the programs; that was just a matter of sheer stupidity.