You're watching the nightly news half hour and a reporter does a segment on the benefits of Medicare. Nothing in the segment identifies it as having been created by a US government agency by our taxdollars. The segment touts the Medicare bill and there is no counter-balancing view. Later you find out that the "news reporter" was in fact an actress paid to pretend she was a reporter, paid for by Health and Human Services to advance the Medicare agenda.

Last week we found out that there is a raft of fake news coming from the government-press releases that not only pretend to be news but are presented to the public without any notification of origin. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) said it is not legal for federal agencies to push out such fake news without identifying its origins. The Bush administration doesn't agree and believes it is fine to make fake news, and it doesn't matter if you know it's fake or not.

We beg to differ. We want to be informed with a disclaimer when a segment is played that it is a product of a federal agency rather than an unbiased news reporter digging out facts for a station. (We would prefer that our tax dollars not be used at all for propaganda.)