Over the past few months, the degree to which the Bush administration has attempted to covertly indoctrinate the American people has become increasingly apparent. Take, for instance, the Armstrong Williams case, in which a columnist was paid $240,000 to shill for government policies, or the Jeff Gannon case, in which a Republican operative was allowed to masquerade as a reporter in White House press conferences for two years. There are many more instances that will inevitably fill up academic studies and books in the future.

The New York Times' team of David Barstow and Robin Stein take a long gander at one modus operandi of the Bush administration as it attempts to artificially drum up support for it's often ill-conceived policies: video news releases.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

Republicans will rightly note that President Bush is not the first to implement such a public relations strategy. Indeed Bill Clinton began the policy in the first place. However, it would be entirely off base to equate the two, as Barstow and Stein note.

A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last Clinton administration spent.

The more frequent use of secretive techniques by the current administration to influence the electorate should be cause for great concern. The latest Ipsos-Public Affairs shows that seven out of ten Americans are worried about increasing government secrecy.

This goes beyond perception, however; in an era of one party rule in Washington, it is essential that the media maintain a skeptical eye on the government. When this doesn't occur, the nation suffers. What happened during the late 1960s underscores this point as major news organizations failed to question claims about the situation in Vietnam from members of the Johnson administration. The consequences today could be equally troubling should the media continue its complicity in the Bush spin game.

The success of the American Democracy relies on a fully functioning and, more importantly, entirely independent media. Reporters on the dole from the administration and local stations running video news releases that amount to Bush ads serve only to undermine our government, not to strengthen it. Change in the media will not come quickly, and although blogs are playing a significant role in goading the big players into action, much more must be done so the Fox News model does not continue to take hold. The stakes are high in this battle. The fate of the nation depends on it.