USA Today has another story about the Bush Administration's foibles today. Add the Department of Agriculture to the list of Bush agencies which paid for good press. When the government does that, it's called propaganda. These people are shameless and apparently there are no repercussions:
A third federal agency has admitted it paid a journalist to write favorable stories about its work. Documents released by the Agriculture Department show it paid a freelance writer $9,375 in 2003 to "research and write articles for hunting and fishing magazines describing the benefits of NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) programs."Are we ever going to find out every press person who is on the Bush payroll? C'mon, this scandal erupted a couple months ago when Armstong Williams was outed as being a paid shill for the GOP. And, the info. is still dribbling out. Didn't Congress have hearings on this already?
Three articles by the writer, Dave Smith, appeared late last year in two magazines aimed at hunting and fishing enthusiasts: Outdoor Oklahoma, published by that state's Department of Wildlife Conservation, and Washington-Oregon Game & Fish, published by Primedia.
Neither identified Smith as having been paid by the government. The stories focused on how money from a 2002 agricultural subsidy bill had been used to help preserve wetlands that hunting and fishing enthusiasts enjoy in Oklahoma and the Northwest.
Smith, a biologist by profession who now works for the NRCS in Montana, said Tuesday that the magazines knew he'd been paid by the Agriculture Department. "I clearly spelled out to them," in writing, "that I'd been hired to do this," he said. He said the magazines did not pay him for the articles. "I knew I couldn't be paid by them" since he'd already been compensated, Smith said.
