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From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

The Bush administration is on the record with doubts about the media-fildered news.

But no problem.

If you don't like somebody else's news, make your own.

The televised images from Baghdad prompted celebrations from Iraqi Americans all across the United States.

They seem to revel in the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime as much as they did in Baghdad.

That's a report produced after the fall of Saddam Hussein and made available to any TV station that wanted to run it.

But it wasn't produced by journalists.

It was produced by public relations professionals

working for the State Department.

It looks like journalism and it sounds like journalism,

but it's actually a video news release, a gussied up commercial used for years by

pharmaceutical companies and other corporate entities to slip product ads or spin into TV

newscasts. And in recent times, governments have gotten in on the Act, state and federal, Democrat, and Republican.

We've reported on the technique before, but last Sunday, the New York Times ran a front-page bombshell that made us gasp.

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