The Facts: For Sale to Highest Bidder

Allow me to be the last to comment on the fake and for-hire pseudo-journalists employed by the Bush administration and its allies.

For those of you who haven't been following the stories, there are three basic storylines here.

The first emerged months ago, when it came to light that the administration's Medicare office had issued video press releases about changes to Medicare's drug benefit plan. Forty television stations ran the press releases, which appeared to be independent news reports. The segment featured a "reporter" -- actually a public relations executive -- saying things like this: "All people with Medicare will be able to get coverage that will lower their prescription drug spending."

The Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, determined that the segment broke federal law against government propaganda.

On the heels of that revelation came another: The Bush administration had paid conservative columnist and television host Armstrong Williams $240,000 of taxpayers' money to promote No Child Left Behind, Bush's education plan. Two less prominent columnists also received payments from federal agencies.

And then, finally, there was James Guckert, the $200-per-hour male escort better known as Jeff Gannon, the White House correspondent for "Talon News." Bloggers, followed by reporters, discovered that Talon had no employees with journalism experience, although it did have quite a few with GOP campaign experience -- as well as close ties to GOPUSA.com. Guckert/Gannon himself, who also lacked press experience, was exposed after lobby one too many blatant softballs to administration officials. In the last, he asked about Democrats who were "divorced from reality." In short, nothing about Gannon/Guckert or his employer qualified him to get a press pass, which government offices normally issue only to representatives if "independent, legitimate" news agencies.

Yet not only did Guckert/Gannon get in the White House under an alias, he also was called on to ask a question by both the president and his Press Secretary.

Now consider how White House Chief of Staff feels about the press. He recently told the New Yorker that the press doesn't ''represent the public any more than other people do,'' adding that the press has no "check-and-balance function."

What we have is a two-pronged strategy. On one hand, the administration seeks to undermine the credibility of the independent press, arguing that reporters are little more than ideological hacks. On the other hand, it disguises propaganda as news, pays columnists, and treats truly ideological non-reporters as if they were the genuine article.

The administration wants to strip away journalists to define the difference between fact and opinion. At the same time, it wants to hide its own agenda behind whatever aura of authority the press still retains.

The upshot is that the very idea of "fact" disappears. Hard truth becomes indiscernible from partisan spin. Honest debate becomes impossible, because the participants cannot even acknowledge the same reality. Or, as a Daily Show commentator once put it, they may simply claim that "the facts themselves are biased." That was a joke, but reporters feel it as true. When the cold, hard truth is hostile to a politician or party, they feel pressured to balance it with spin from the other side. To not allow distortion into their story would open them to claims of bias.

While he has had some successes, facts like the soaring budget deficit, the weakening dollar, and the continuing insurgency in Iraq could have been thorns in Bush's side. Instead, he has successfully (in a political sense) ignored those facts and asserted a set of contrary ones.

It no longer matters if that contrary set of facts is true. If the press doesn't buy it, just do what you always do: remind the world that they are biased.