The other Karen

Sunday's New York Times has a detailed story on the extensive US government production of news-style videos, which often find their way, without disclaimers as to source, onto regular local news broadcasts. The revelations of a few months ago, of pseudo-news booster videos for Dubya's elderly healthcare prescription plan by "Karen Ryan, reporting" turn out to be just a sliver of a broadbased propaganda effort across many government departments.

Unfortunately, the seemingly decentralized nature of these efforts, as well as the decentralized nature of the news distribution business itself, make it difficult to spot a guiding hand. But there are enough clues there to identify some suspects. Consider first one segment in the NYT article, tracing how a pleasing story about post-Taliban Afghanistan found its way into local TV news in Memphis:

The explanation begins inside the White House, where the president's communications advisers devised a strategy after Sept. 11, 2001, to encourage supportive news coverage of the fight against terrorism. The idea, they explained to reporters at the time, was to counter charges of American imperialism by generating accounts that emphasized American efforts to liberate and rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq.

An important instrument of this strategy was the Office of Broadcasting Services, a State Department unit of 30 or so editors and technicians whose typical duties include distributing video from news conferences. But in early 2002, with close editorial direction from the White House, the unit began producing narrated feature reports, many of them promoting American achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq and reinforcing the administration's rationales for the invasions.
....
Several segments focused on the liberation of Afghan women, which a White House memo from January 2003 singled out as a "prime example" of how "White House-led efforts could facilitate strategic, proactive communications in the war on terror."

Now consider a different NYT story from Saturday, following up a Washington Post scoop on Friday that Dubya is looking for a way to bring back his favourite "strong woman" Karen Hughes, from self-imposed exile in Texas. The NYT reports that the specific position identified for her is the Middle East public diplomacy slot at the State Department, a job that people keep leaving. And what is her prior diplomatic experience?

... a former Texas television reporter who is not known for her expertise in foreign affairs. But she is personally close to Ms. Rice, has the full confidence of Mr. Bush, and was the driving force behind an American campaign during the war in Afghanistan that publicized the plight of Afghan women.

That campaign was part of her larger responsibility at the time as the coordinator of wartime public relations, an assignment Mr. Bush gave her 24 hours after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. "When he called me that morning, he told me that this will be an ongoing process of educating the public," Ms. Hughes said in an interview in November 2001. "He said, 'O.K., go for it.' "

Since then, Ms. Hughes has made several trips to Afghanistan to highlight American assistance to Afghan women, who were kept out of schools, offices and public life under the rule of the Taliban

At the risk of spelling it out even further, note: Hughes, a former local news TV reporter, who was given the job of the PR campaign for the Afghan war by Dubya, and then these videos appear from the State Department on that very topic "with close editorial direction from the White House." Much circumstantial evidence therefore that the whole propaganda machine was driven by Karen Hughes -- and Dubya thinks the world can now benefit from the same treatment.