-By Warner Todd Huston
What is it called when a government creates a state-sponsored “news” agency, again? Ah yes, it’s called government propaganda. And that is what the Obama administration seems interested in creating if the words of Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis’s senior advisor Carl Fillichio can be believed.
On Nov. 19 Fillichio attended the annual meeting of the International Labor Communications Association and in his address to the room he laid out a few “revolutionary” plans and policy ideas one of which was to create a new media agency that would act as a sort of ministry of Big Labor information all run out of the Secretary of Labor’s office in Washington D.C.
The advisor to the Secretary of Labor told the audience that one of the things that vexed his department is that it was so hard to get their “news” reported by the media. “We battle every single day when we try to put something out,” Fillichio told the audience.
Fillichio reported to the conference that he’d hired a person for his office solely to deal with labor media propaganda efforts. He also gave out the person’s email address and phone number so the union members in attendance at the meeting could have easy access to this government sponsored media director.
“We cannot depend on those other people – the traditional media – to get that message out,” Fillichio said.
Imagine what is being said here. A person of high position in the Department of Labor is proposing that he be the one to “report” labor news. He is proposing that the government itself become a media agency in an effort to get around “the traditional media.”
Every totalitarian government has such government-controlled agencies, of course. Who can forget the U.S.S.R.’s famed Pravda and Izvestia news agencies?
Of course, there was an old Soviet joke about those two largest Soviet “news” agencies. It goes like this: “there’s no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda.” You see, in Russian the word pravda can be defined as “truth” and izvestia translated as “news.” Hence there was no truth or news in the Soviet’s daily newspapers. This is essentially what we’d get with the Obama administration’s idea of a new ministry of labor information sponsored by none other than Obama and his hand-picked, big labor-friendly, minions.
Government officials that tend toward an authoritarian view of their job often dream of fully controlling what the media reports about their office. They also closely guard what information goes out to the media. But it is one thing to closely guard what information is released and a whole other thing to create an agency to “report” the news.
Lastly, think of this for just a minute. If Fillichio and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis don’t think that the left-wing, Old Media is fair enough to them, just imagine how biased and left-wing the “news” that this new ministry of Big Labor information would be disgorging! I mean if the leftists in the Old Media aren’t leftist enough to suit Obama’s Dept. of Labor, I shudder to think how far left these guys really are.
Chalk this up as yet one more step toward authoritarianism evinced by this president and his administration.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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