Justice Dept Tells Agencies to Ignore GAO Ruling on "Covert Propaganda"

The New York Times reported that at least 20 federal agencies, from the defence department to the census bureau, had adopted the technique of distributing prepackaged reports and scripted interviews with Bush administration officials to television stations.
Many of the segments were broadcast as news without any acknowledgement from the broadcaster that they were government releases, and put on air in some of America's largest cities.

...The practice has come under scrutiny from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Although the US is free to propagate pro-administration views abroad, such broadcasts are illegal on American soil.
The GAO issued a critical ruling of the Bush administration's public relations drive last month, calling such segments "covert propaganda". On Friday, however, the justice department circulated a memo instructing agencies to ignore the GAO findings.