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which were disseminated by the Education Department, did not acknowledge that the
government had generated them. As the GAO stated,

The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story
misleads the viewing public by encouraging the audience to believe that the broadcasting
news organizations developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are
purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the
public.50

In the war in Iraq, the struggle to control information has become almost as crucial, albeit
not as prominent, as the actual military conflict. In February 2002, the New York
Times reported that as part of its campaign to win “hearts and minds,” the U.S. Defense
Department had created an Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) intended to “provide news
items” to international media organizations in both friendly and hostile nations. The new
office was reportedly given a budget in excess of $100 million for its first year of
operation.51 Barely a week after this story was published, then Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld announced that the government would close down the program. However, in
2005 the Los Angeles Times reported that the Pentagon in 2003 had nonetheless
continued to place pro-U.S. articles in Iraqi newspapers with the help of a number of
private contractors. Among them, the Lincoln Group—a U.S.-based strategic
communications firm whose self-described purpose is to help clients “influence their target
audience,”52—was alone responsible for planting hundreds of stories in Iraqi
newspapers.53 Many papers were paid to publish these articles, and their origins were not
disclosed. Referred to by the military as “psychological operations,” such efforts to control
information and public opinion have persisted along with the war. In July 2005, the
Pentagon awarded new contracts worth $300 million to three firms, including the Lincoln
Group, to continue placing stories in the Iraqi press.54

State Funded Media

Radio and television broadcasting in the United States has historically been private,
beginning with the first radio networks—NBC and CBS—in the 1920s, which controlled
both the broadcast industry and the technological innovations that fueled it at the time. In
this respect, America differs from Europe, where state funding was integral to the
formation of broadcast media. In 1927, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) became
the first publicly owned broadcasting company in the world, and when the first radio
waves were broadcast from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, they were sponsored by the state.

Federal funds were not used to support broadcasting in the United States until the 1962
passage of the Educational Television Facilities Act, and even then they backed only
television stations with explicitly educational content.55 But in 1967, the Public
Broadcasting Act provided federal support for the first time to the programming and
operational costs of local broadcasting facilities. U.S. public broadcasting was never

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