Editorial: All the news that’s paid to fit

Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005 | 7:52 a.m.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the U.S. government has been secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops that, while basically factual, are slanted to support the U.S. mission in Iraq.

According to the Times report Wednesday, the Lincoln Group, a Washington, D.C.-based company, translates the stories into Arabic and gets them placed in Baghdad newspapers. Sometimes, it says, the company's representatives or its subcontractors in Iraq pretend to be freelance writers to plant the stories.

A Lincoln Group spokeswoman declined to discuss the contract with the Los Angeles newspaper because she says its contract is with the U.S. government -- ignoring the fact that the government's contracts are paid with the public's money, and therefore are the public's business.

A Pentagon spokesman told the Times that he didn't have any specifics on the matter, but that if the newspaper's report is true it contains information he would "find troubling."

It is troubling to think that the United States sends thousands of its young people to fight a war that the president says will bring Iraq a democracy, including a free press, and at the same time secretly pays for slanted news reports in hopes of influencing the Iraqi citizenry.

But it is not surprising coming from the Bush administration, which has paid at least three conservative journalists to surreptitiously promote its agenda and distributed "news" videos that concealed the fact they were produced by the government.

Distributing information abroad that promotes the United States during a war isn't a problem as long we are open and honest about the fact that our government is the source of it. But it is despicable for our government to disguise such information as "news," which readers may believe is the product of objective reporting.

It undermines the credibility the United States hopes to build with the people of Iraq, and the practice must stop.