Someone found a box of spines

Okay, I was wrong to condemn the entire party just because Harry Reid grew up in Searchlight, Nevada. I'll acknowledge that I was, shall we say, a bit reactionary. It appears that while Harry was crafting his, ahem, rebuttal, other Senators were really doing the work of an opposition party.

Yesterday the "Stop Government Propaganda Act" was introduced in the Senate. (This is FAS's copy of the Congressional Record. You can also find it at loc.gov, but it's messier). I haven't read through the whole thing myself, and I'm too tired to be willing right now, but at first glance it looks like a damn fine statement. Obviously inspired by the mounting discoveries of the Bush empire's media bribes, it addresses a wide ranging set of infractions including Social Security employees being pressured to back false crisis claims. It's snowball-in-hell legislation to be sure, but I for one, am going to write Lautenberg and Kennedy (who it seems were the originators) and thank them. The thing has bite.

Check this out from the explanatory statement:

When the GAO finds that taxpayer funds are misspent for propaganda purposes, and the agency fails to follow the GAO's ordered actions, our bill would call for the head of that agency's salary to be withheld.
. . .
As we seek to establish democracy in Iraq, let's first remove this taint from our own democracy.

Go Frank!

And can I ask where is the media coverage on this. Um hello? When you type "stop government propaganda act" into yahoo news, you get six hits. One is a decent, if short, Newsweek piece on payola that includes this call to action:

There's likely more to come. While Bush said last week that he wants his departments to cease paying columnists, his administration has doled out $250 million in taxpayer money to private public-relations firms, twice what had been spent before. More of that indefensible largesse will likely turn up in propaganda masquerading as journalism. That is, after all, the point of public relations. The story will emerge slowly because the Democrats don't control Congress and can issue no subpoenas, and because there's so little digging into what goes on inside federal agencies. Why? With daily deadlines and frequent TV gigs, Washington reporters are stretched too thin.

So can the bloggers ride to the rescue, as they did in Rathergate? They offer readers a huge new menu of tasty and often nourishing bite-size appetizers, while keeping what they call the "mainstream media" (MSM) from spitting in the soup [well, that's not really what we call you, but okay]. And the democratic din of thousands of competing voices is exactly what the Founders envisioned when they sought to protect the rights of pamphleteers, who were the bloggers of the early republic.

Okay folks, Newsweek has given us our marching orders. Long live the broadside!! Everyone go post about the Stop Government Propaganda Act now. (When you type that into Technorati, you get 120 hits.)

As an aside, I will admit that I am predisposed to like any piece of legislation that uses the word "puffery" in its definitions.