.. that the Bush administration issues press releases that the media then use to publish news reports without attribution to the government. So says the Associated press. How do we know the senators are upset? Why, they put it in a letter that their offices obviously made public as, well, a press release.

The news here is that the Associated Press reported this story as a story. A big part of the federal government’s budget goes to informing the public about what the government is doing. Naturally, a lot of this is spun in a way that makes incumbent officials look good, but most of it is entirely legit. Especially when a news story about some government action first breaks, the government is certain to be the repository of most of the basic facts. The public has a keen interest in how its tax dollars are being spent, and the government has an interest as well as a responsibility to make sure that accurate information about action taken in the public’s behalf is disclosed when the time is ripe for disclosure. Further, some government missions — such as law enforcement or national security — have a deterrent component. The public is not safe unless the government makes clear that certain types of bad behavior will result in aggressive counter-action.

The Clinton administration was masterful at getting into the public domain information about the initiatives it was up to. In the years I worked in the Clinton Justice Department, I have trouble remembering a single big case that did not generate a press release — and usually more than one. In fact, to feed the media beast, prosecutors were expected to have a press release ready just about the minute a jury returned a guilty verdict, even though most good trial lawyers think it tempts the fates in a most presumptuous way to write about victory before it has been achieved. And it was a rarity that the grateful reporters would ever cite to the Justice Department’s press release, even upon cribbing from it liberally. It was no different in the Reagan or Bush 41 years. This is what government does, and what government should do.

The current “story” appears to be that what the government now puts out includes video — rather than just the old written information. So what? This is just catching up with the times — the reality that most people get their news from television. It doesn’t convert government agency press offices into a propaganda ministries — a la, say, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information in the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson.