Rod Paige is watching you
From our intrepid education reporter Bruce Buchanan:
The Roman poet Juneval asked, "Who watches the watchmen?"
The answer, apparently, is the U.S. Department of Education.
On Monday, former News & Record staffer Ben Feller, now the national education reporter for the Associated Press, broke the story that the Department of Education paid a private company to grade news stories written about the No Child Left Behind school reform act.
For example, stories receive five points for pointing out that "NCLB ensures that teacher quality is a high priority." But newspapers were docked five points if they mention "NCLB is not sufficiently funded."
Individual reporters also received evaluations, based on whether or not their coverage was deemed favorable to the Department of Education. No News & Record stories or reporters were graded in the report. However, the Ketchum public relations firm did evaluate stories from nearly 20 daily newspapers.
The Associated Press also reported that the Department of Education commissioned a pro-No Child Left Behind video that gives the appearance that it was produced by an independent news agency.
Comments (2)
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It gets better. The video news release, put out in hopes that cash-strapped TV news operations would run it as-is, featured the same fake TV-news reporter who appeared this past spring in a similar bit of propaganda on the new Medicare program, paid for by the Dept. of Health and Human Services (info at http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2004/03/31/ryan_video.html).
This practice is illegal, by the way (info at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41077-2004May19.html): Your tax dollars aren't supposed to be used to produce partisan political messages or for other partisan political activity, and it's very hard to interpret these faux "news" reports, not to mention grading of stories and reporters, as anything other than partisan.
Posted on October 12, 2004 2:38 PM
Our current Administration will stop at nothing to stay in power and this is further proof that I'm right.
PS. Until about a month ago I was a lifelong Republican, but I saw the light and converted to Democrat.
Posted on October 13, 2004 7:23 PM