BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Another week, another round of government officials raising their right hands. Between the televised hearings on Iraqi prisoner abuse and the televised hearings on the 9/11 Commission, it's easy to feel that we're privy to history in the making. But many more hearings happen behind closed doors. For example, in a closed session with the 9/11 Commission back in February, a former FBI translator named Sibel Edmonds described intelligence reports that crossed her desk in the summer of 2001. She later told the Independent of London that those reports included warnings that Al Qaeda planned to fly hijacked airplanes into U.S. skyscrapers and included a general time frame for the planned attack. Her allegations were immediately picked up by news outlets around the world, but hardly at all here in the U.S., and the Justice Department is doing its best to keep it that way. It recently blocked Edmonds from testifying in a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims, and this week it took the rare step of retroactively classifying information about her given to Congress almost two years ago. As of Friday, Edmonds' allegations had yet to appear in the Washington Post, but they did appear in the Post's online edition, in a column by Jefferson Morley. Jeff, welcome to the show.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: This past Thursday, the New York Times made its first mention of Sibel Edmonds' name. That story was headlined: Material Given to Congress in 2002 Is Now Classified. Did you see that piece?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Yes, I did.

BOB GARFIELD: Did it strike you as weird, Jeff, that the New York Times wrote a story about an extraordinary case of the government trying to retroactively classify something that was already a part of the Congressional Record, and yet the story about it never really discloses the substance of the allegations that the government is trying to quash.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: It is weird. The problem is that there's a gag order on, and it works. I mean the government has a gag order on her, so a lot of things she cannot talk about, and so it's harder for reporters to write about. That's the first part of why the full story isn't being aired in the press yet.

BOB GARFIELD: Aired in the press in the United States. The press in Europe seems to have felt unchastened by the uncertainties attached to a story where the primary source is gagged by the government. Why is that?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Everywhere but in the United States, people jumped on the story thinking, hey, this could be important. It was well-covered in Latin America. In Europe, the Scotsman, a generally conservative paper, gave prominent play to Edmonds' charges. Said that her allegations starkly contradicted the administration's claims. U.S. News organizations and especially Washington reporters - for something with the political import of what she's saying - in order to sell the story in a newsroom, you need high level sources to say yes, you know, that's true. But nobody high up in the FBI is going to back it up at this point; it's nothing but trouble, and the 9/11 Commission members and the Senate staffers who talked about this story have been told not to talk about it. So, that's where the gag order is working. Washington correspondents are going to back away. Probably more so than foreign correspondents.

BOB GARFIELD:Jeff, I'm sure many of our listeners will see this episode as just yet another smoking gun -- proof that the craven corporate-owned U.S. media are once again demonstrating they are lapdogs to The Man. Is that really what's going on here?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: I get a little impatient with people whose first instinct is to blame the press. It's a complicated and sensitive story, and we haven't seen the original documentation. But I think reporters are being excessively deferential to the executive branch, and it seems to me it's past the point where the executive branch gets the benefit of the doubt on a story like this. I'm hoping that people will begin to see that retroactive de-classification is smoke. Okay? And where there's smoke, there may be fire. Now, there's a third thing which, which is mitigating for journalists too, which is we're in information overload about 9/11 stories. We have the commission hearings, we have Richard Clarke, and so I think for some reporters, you know, they feel too busy to get to it -- there's too much going on.

BOB GARFIELD:Although, we're talking about advance intelligence that hijacked airplanes were going to hit the World Trade Center. This is not the kind of thing that people would just push to the bottom of their pile. That would be a, a blockbuster story, if corroborated.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Yes.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, now you work at Washington Post dot com -- you have worked at the Washington Post - the print edition - how would you go about writing a story given the institutional caution of major news organizations that could adequately get Sibel Edmonds' charges out there without practicing bad journalism?

JEFFERSON MORLEY: I think the way the story needs to be covered is around the legal action that's ongoing right now, because that's something that is not an allegation. The retroactive de-classification is remarkable; the case law around these type of things is quite explicit. Under the Freedom of Information Act, for example, a de-classified document cannot be re-classified - ever, for any reason. But I think that a little more transparency about what her allegations are and the conditions that she's under as far as the gag order -- I mean spelling that out is imperative. It doesn't have to be the lead of the story, but it should be in the story somewhere. Not to say that it's necessarily true or not, but to say that these allegations have been made by a serious person who was in the position to know sensitive information; the government has acknowledged that by putting a gag order on her. And so therefore, it should be pursued. And hopefully it will be pursued.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, well Jeff, thanks very much.

JEFFERSON MORLEY: Thank you very much, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Washington Post dot com. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Classifying documents retroactively may be highly unusual, but when the Justice Department blocked Edmonds' from testifying in a 9/11-related lawsuit, it pulled a legal trigger that has become almost routine in the age of terror. It's called the "State Secrets Privilege." That privilege has an interesting history, beginning back in 1948 when an Air Force planed crashed in Georgia. Nine men died, among them four civilians, and three of their widows sued. The government argued that releasing documents related to their deaths would threaten national security, and it won. In U.S. versus Reynolds, a new and enduring legal precedent was set by the Supreme Court. But now, U.S. versus Reynolds is being challenged. The children of the dead have finally had a look at those half century-old documents, and they say they can find nothing at all that relates to national security. They charge the government with a cover-up, and in so doing suggest that the case that underpins the government's right to keep so many secrets is based on a fraud. In January, we spoke to Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, and he explained exactly what precedent was set fifty years ago and what it meant.

JONATHAN TURLEY: What the court said was that trial judges needed to consider privilege arguments by the government, but the court also said that courts should struggle to remove only that evidence that clearly would violate national security. So the case itself really didn't give a hint of what it would become, because over the decades that followed, courts began to simply allow the privilege to be used almost unilaterally. A lot of district judges, frankly, don't want the headache of national security cases. And so when the government comes in with a silver bullet and says dismiss the whole case, a lot of judges are not complaining much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And is it seen as a silver bullet generally in the legal community or just by government lawyers?

JONATHAN TURLEY:Well, frankly when United States/Reynolds comes around, you pretty much know the government's on the ropes. This is the thing that they pull out when their case is not going well or they found something enormously embarrassing in the file. I've actually been in a courtroom where Reynolds was invoked, and people laughed. They actually invoked the privilege over a manual that was reportedly available on the internet, and reporters in the room were literally holding them up so the judge could see.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And the judge still went with the government?

JONATHAN TURLEY: Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Well, let's go back to the original case - in Reynolds, the plaintiffs here are charging, the courts could have seen that the government was lying about its national security significance if it wanted to, and it simply chose to ignore it.

JONATHAN TURLEY: I think that is true - that the Supreme Court acted in what can only be viewed as willful blindness. At the time, it was abundantly clear to many that the Air Force was lying --that they could, in fact, produce this information -- if not in the direct report, in a summary of the report. So then in 2000, when finally these memos appear, we have this line in the memo saying: "The aircraft is not considered to have been safe for flight." That was the conclusion of the report. Now even if they had redacted the entirety of the report so that the basis of that conclusion is hidden, they should have at least produced that conclusion.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:But the courts at the time decided that that report could be kept secret, and now we have Reynolds today. And how has it been applied in the prosecution of the government's war on terror?

JONATHAN TURLEY: Attorney General Ashcroft took every possible case to muster in, in support of his national security efforts. Well, Reynolds was ready made for that. And now Reynolds has virtually become a stamp. I mean any case that involves remotely the military or national security or, you know, poultry regulations -- any type of civil liberties claim that's been brought since 9/11 has run right into Reynolds, and the government's come forward and said look, we can't tell you whether we're beating detainees, cause it would reveal state secrets. Well, that's bloody ridiculous. I mean if you're asking about whether detainees have been beaten, you're asking about whether a crime has occurred. That's not a matter of national security. It's a matter of criminal law.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So let's return to the current challenge to Reynolds, which is called Herring versus the United States. Where does it stand?

JONATHAN TURLEY:Well, the daughter of one of the engineers on that fateful flight uncovered this smoking gun, if you will, where the, the memo which had no national security components but a heck of a lot of embarrassing stuff to say about the Air Force -- they filed with the Supreme Court and said look - it appears that you were lied to; you created a whole doctrine on an act of deception. Well, not surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to take it up. This is an enormous embarrassment for them as an institution. They then filed in the federal district court, and once again, the Justice Department is moving to dismiss that action. The troubling thing about these filings is the apparent lack of recourse, when you find that the government lied -- not in a small way, but in a way that created this massive doctrine, and if the district court dismisses this action, then there really isn't any deterrent to the government from lying. I mean it --even when you can wave around a memo in which they clearly misled the Supreme Court of the United States, there's no recourse. Well that's going to send one hell of a message to Justice Department attorneys.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jonathan Turley, thank you very much.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Thank you.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Jonathan Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School. Two weeks ago the case was addressed for the first time in 50 years in federal district court in Philadelphia. The judge is likely to rule next month on the government's request to dismiss. [MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD: Coming up, the many faces of Colin Powell, and the politics of mispronun--ciliation.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR.
BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. When NBC's Tim Russert interviewed Colin Powell from Jordan on last Sunday's Meet the Press, the big news was that a flustered State Department flak abruptly pushed the camera, because Russert had exceeded his time, forcing other news outlets to re-schedule their satellite feeds. But the real news was what Powell said about the evidence he presented against Saddam Hussein at the United Nations in February, 2003.

COLIN POWELL: Turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases deliberately misleading.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: We all know that by now. The important part was that he said it. It was yet another strike against the administration in a public relations war waged almost from the moment President Bush made Powell the first member of his cabinet. Time Magazine, September 10th, 2001. On the cover, a portrait of the secretary of state, half in shadow. The headline, a plaintive question: Where Have You Gone, Colin Powell? "By the cruel calculus of Washington, you are only as powerful as people think you are," Time observed. "Powell's megastar wattage looks curiously dimmed, as if someone had turned his light way down." Still, according to a 2001 Gallup Poll, roughly 85 percent of Americans regarded Powell favorably.

GLENN KESSLER: ...in fact, taking the secretary of state's job was a bit of a risk for him, cause he had an unbelievable image -- sky-high approval ratings, more popular than the President of the United States; Colin Powell cares deeply about the image that he has.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Washington Post Diplomatic Correspondent Glenn Kessler says that it was because of that image that Powell found himself before the UN that February.

GLENN KESSLER: He was selected to give that speech because he was the most respected member of the administration around the world.

COLIN POWELL: The material I will present to you comes from a variety of sources. Some are U.S. sources, and some are those of other countries. Some of the sources are...

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Immediately after Powell's masterful presentation at the UN, a Newsweek poll showed the highest support for war in more than a year -- a full 10 percent increase over two weeks earlier. And what happened after no weapons of mass destruction were found? His numbers gradually slipped into the high 60s, where they remain as of last month's CBS/New York Times poll.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:That means that one of the most thwarted secretaries of state in history is still far and away the most popular member of his administration. Why does the public cling to its faith in Powell while the rest of the cabinet's numbers continue their downward slide?

CLARENCE PAGE: Colin Powell is one of those media unshakables who, even when something resembling a negative image comes his way, it bounces right off, better than Teflon.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Chicago Tribune Columnist Clarence Page.

CLARENCE PAGE:Colin Powell rose up in the '90s to prominence at a time when we really needed some black heroes. The man seems almost too good to be true, but we want him to be true, and he is a guy who fits the role -- he has an unblemished record, wonderful family life, worked his way up, immigrant family -- I mean, you name it --he is an iconic figure, larger than life. I mean people tell me whether they like Powell's politics or not, they just can't get enough of him.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I began my research on the media management of the Secretary of State by plugging search words into the databases of Lexis-Nexis and Google News. I tried "Powell and polls," "Powell and public opinion," "Powell and the media," and pretty much came up with zip about his image. Then I typed in Powell and "good soldier." After that, the deluge. The phrase was everywhere.

THOMAS FRIED

MAN: Powell seems to be a tortured figure, you know, when it comes to this war.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: New York Times Columnist Thomas Friedman speaking last month on All Things Considered.

THOMAS FRIED

MAN: On the one hand, he was clearly the good soldier who, you know, marched in the direction that his leader ordered. At the same time, like many people, he clearly had misgivings about how complicated this operation would be.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:The public knew about the good soldier's private torment because of a steady stream of press leaks resulting in scores of newspaper accounts with unnamed sources attesting to Powell's lonely struggle for multilateralism. In May, a long piece in Vanity Fair chronicled the tug of war over his UN testimony. The June issue of GQ had a story about him called Casualty of War. GQ reporter Wil Hylton said Powell's people encouraged him to write the piece and even supplied sources. One source, Powell's Chief of Staff Larry Wilkerson, is quoted as saying the Secretary is "tired, mentally and physically" and most likely would not serve a second term. But now the State Department is indignant. They say Hylton broke the rules, a charge that Hylton denies. Glenn Kessler.

GLENN KESSLER: They were upset because they said some of those interviews were not to be on the record. They were to be with no names attached. It raised a bit of a curtain on the process that the State Department has used to tell the story of Colin Powell in a way that is advantageous for him.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Kessler says the process involves seeding the press with comments from anonymous colleagues that the Secretary can later deny if he chooses. Recently, he shrugged off some assertions made in Bob Woodward's book, Plan of Attack, for which Powell is widely assumed to have been a source. Thus, the story of Powell gets out, while he remains the good soldier. But as the public loses confidence in the White House, Powell has changed his approach by openly defying its policies -- denouncing the UN speech he formerly defended, condemning the recent actions of Ariel Sharon, stating that the President was fully informed of the Red Cross's concerns about Abu Ghraib long before the photos surfaced. But for all his dissent, the good soldier still declines to resign his commission, as he told Ted Koppel on Nightline.

TED KOPPEL: If the President asked you, would you stay on for a second term?

COLIN POWELL: I serve at the pleasure of the President.

TED KOPPEL: Of course you do.

COLIN POWELL: Period.

TED KOPPEL: But serving at the pleasure of the President -I just - I've, I've heard you say that so many times that I just want to--

COLIN POWELL: Cause it's the only standard answer you can give--

TED KOPPEL: It's the only answer you can give without saying anything.

COLIN POWELL: --it's the only answer you can give that does not set people running off into a-- a line of speculation and, and gossip that serves no purpose.

JAMES MANN: The public image of Powell is the straight up guy, but the reality is he's also a real Washington operator.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. He says the public also perceives Powell as a dove, but that's not entirely true either.

JAMES MANN: You have to keep in mind that this is a guy who was Ronald Reagan's National Security Advisor, who in the 1980s supported Star Wars, supported aid to the Contras. He took the lead in supporting American military intervention in Panama in 1989. He's a - he's a pretty hawkish guy within the general overall spectrum of, of American foreign policy. Personally I think the, the public identifies him as a dove but then can't quite figure out why he stays on in the administration when it goes off in different directions.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:So you think the answer to the burning question -- why didn't he leave? -- is simply that he didn't really disagree as much as the public thinks he did.

JAMES MANN: That's exactly right.

CLARENCE PAGE: I think the public has short memories when it comes to the details.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Chicago Tribune Columnist Clarence Page.

CLARENCE PAGE: His iconic image is strong enough that it will weather this storm just as he's weathered the storms of the My Lai controversy, of the Iran-Contra controversy, of the first Gulf War where critics said he pulled out too soon - we should have gone all the way to Baghdad.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Page says Powell was a passive figure in those controversies. True, Powell drafted an official denial of what came to be called the My Lai Massacre, but he said he didn't know the real story until much later. True, he knew about Iran-Contra, but he was on duty in Germany when the scandal broke. True, he didn't pursue Saddam to Baghdad in the first Gulf War. But he said no one favored that course. Page wrote in a recent column that Powell knows how to play the media as well as John Coltrane played the tenor sax. Nevertheless--

CLARENCE PAGE: I like the man. I believe him. I believe that he is a man of character and integrity. In short, he's got my vote if he runs for president. [LAUGHS]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:He's not the only one. Colin Powell is the very model of the principled outsider, even if he is a skilled operator, and a dove -- except when he's a hawk. A simple, complicated man who always seems to be telling the truth, even when he's saying nothing at all. [MUSIC] BOB GARFIELD: As we've heard, some people think Colin Powell is a tortured figure because he's unable to influence policy in Iraq. Others think the word torture should be reserved for actual torture, such as the detainees in Abu Ghraib prison were subjected to in Iraq. Still others believe that those detainees were not tortured but simply "abused," and that torture is something out of Saddam's dungeons or a scene from Marathon Man. In an op-ed in Newsday this week, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg mused over the invocation of the word torture -- much as he examines the use and abuse of language in his new book Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Confrontational Times. He joins us now. Geoff, welcome to On the Media.

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Oh, well thanks so much for having me.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, let's start with your title. It would suggest that words are being used by the government or by the government's critics these days as weapons of mass deception. Do you think that's true?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Yeah, I think language is always used in a way that can be deceptive. There's never been an age that was so wary of the dangers of linguistic manipulation or so on the alert against deceptive language, and at the same time, I think there's never been an age that was so easily manipulated by language. And, and in a funny way, those go together, I think.

BOB GARFIELD:Well, actually you've anticipated my next question, because discussion of word choice has swirled so much during the last year or so. The President's use of the word "crusade," the way he says "nucular" instead of nuclear, that perversely-named Patriot Act, Freedom Fries -- maybe it's not unusual for language to be manipulated in times of war, but do you recall a time when it's been as debated as much as it has been now?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: What's new I think is that people are very alert to these little fillips of language, the way it can be tilted one way or the other, and at the same time I think very vulnerable. What advertisers learned a long time ago is that the more sophisticated you are, the easier it is to gull you into one or another position. It doesn't matter if you think you're hip to what's going on. Language still works on you.

BOB GARFIELD:Well, give me some examples of doublespeak that we recognize as doublespeak but which nonetheless manages to press our emotional buttons.

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: For six months after 9/11, Bush was using the phrase "evildoer" like it was a kind of pronoun - you know, the evildoer said this, the evildoer said that. And it's something that people were aware of as a deliberate linguistic maneuver, but at the same time it did frame the issue in a certain way of us and them - of good and evil and so on that was nonetheless really important in shaping the terms of the debate about terrorism. There's another kind of language that, to my mind, or at least from a linguist's point of view is almost more interesting, which is the way certain suppositions and assumptions are built into the words we use so that we don't question them, we don't think to ask is that manipulative or whatever. You know, the other day I did a search on the word "values," and I looked in the New York Times and the Washington Post over the last five years, and it turned out that the phrase "conservative values" was anywhere from four to five times as frequent as the word "liberal values." That is to say, values basically belong to conservatives. The word belongs to conservatives, even in the so-called "liberal press."

BOB GARFIELD:You can actually co-opt our whole thinking process on how we respond to words if, if you're rigorous enough in invoking the same word again and again and again -- staying on message, in other words?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Yeah, that, that's part of it, and part of it is the way these words just build certain assumptions. Take the phrase "regime change." The interesting thing is that the word "regime" itself encodes a certain point of view. If you call something a regime, you are likely to mean that it's authoritarian. You also mean that in some sense it's unstable. It's the Latin Americans who have democratic regimes. In Western Europe they don't have democratic regimes. They have democracies. It's just an assumption that's built into the word itself which transcends these partisan distinctions that everybody's so interested in.

BOB GARFIELD:In one of the essays of your book you make a distinction between linguistic gaffes that are either typos or "thinkos," and you use as an example the President's mispronunciation of nuclear. Tell me more.

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Nuclear is really no harder to pronounce than likelier. And what's more, this is a word that Bush's father pronounced correctly, that Bush would have grown up hearing pronounced properly, whether around the table in Kennebunkport or when he was at Andover or when he was at Yale, and at a certain point, I think it became for him a conscious choice. I call it a, a "faux-Bubba" pronunciation. To my mind, when somebody like that says the word, it doesn't count the same way it does when Homer Simpson says it as nucular. It's rather a way of saying you know-- I got my finger on this button, and I'll call these things whatever I damn well please.

BOB GARFIELD:We've spent a lot of time on this show considering the effect of the repeated use of shocking imagery, and the effect of those images over time being denuded of their impact. Does that also happen with words? Are there powerful words that cease to be powerful through constant repetition and sort of sloganizing?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Certainly that happens to all words. I mean it happens in two ways. On the one hand, a powerful word can be defused and neutralized sometimes, and, and often that's a deliberate effort by one side to neutralize the power that another word can have. You can hear it in the way the right, for instance, has taken over, neutralized words like "discrimination," "bias," "hate speech,"--

BOB GARFIELD: And leave us not forget "terrorism."

GEOFFREY NUNBERG:Terrorism is a very powerful word that, you know, from its root had this notion of terror, and in early days of the sublime attached to it. It's just a word that has no real force any more.

BOB GARFIELD: Everything is called terrorism, so is, is therefore nothing--

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Right.

BOB GARFIELD: -- terrorism any more?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG:Well, there's something to be said for reserving those words for only things that merit them. After 9/11, for example, people were looking for language that would render the genuine horror and distress that they felt, and they'd go for these words, they'd say oh, it was shocking, it was terrible, it was like a battlefield -- and these were words that seemed to have been denuded of any power they might once have had. And particularly in a media environment that feeds on that kind of indignation and tries to turn every school board decision and every little injustice into an occasion for enormous indignation and horror and so on and so forth -- the language necessarily just becomes washed out.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, Geoff Nunberg, thank you very much.

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Geoffrey Nunberg is the author of Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Confrontational Times. [MUSIC] BROOKE GLADSTONE: And now for a few of your letters. A few weeks ago, we spoke with medical anthropologist and marketing consultant Clotaire Rapaille who said presidential candidates need to tap into their reptilian brain to win. Listener Thomas Eccardt wonders whether Rapaille, quote, "was sent here by the French as a means of vengeance for Freedom Fries. The philosophy of following your gut feelings is finally coming home to roost in the war in Iraq. The U.S. doesn't need yet another dose of this poison, unless we want to follow the fate of that fabulously successful group of reptiles known as the dinosaurs."

BOB GARFIELD:A correction from several listeners including Robert Anderson of Brooklyn, New York. "In your story about the Godzilla movies," he writes, "you mention that Dodgers Pitcher Hideo Nomo had the nickname 'Godzilla.' Au contraire, Yankees slugger Hideki Matsui is Godzilla." And Richard Brouillette of New York City adds "Great story, but one thing struck me about the gender aspect of Godzilla. Everyone in the story referred to Godzilla as "he," but wasn't he a "she" who later became a mother of Godzookie? Perhaps the only thing Godzilla can't break is the glass ceiling."

BROOKE GLADSTONE:And an update -- in March we told you about a controversial series of TV news reports touting the benefits of the new Medicare law -- controversial because the spots were written and produced by the Department of Health and Human Services. They aired on over 40 local news programs with no hint that they were produced by the government. Democrats in Congress claimed that HHS money was being used illegally for a political public relations campaign, and the General Accounting Office, a non-partisan arm of Congress, agreed to investigate.

BOB GARFIELD:On Wednesday, the GAO announced that the Bush administration had, in fact, violated the law by using taxpayer money to fund covert propaganda. The GAO has no law enforcement authority, but Democrats in Congress are working on a bill that would require the Bush-Cheney campaign to reimburse the money.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:There's a link to the full text of the GAO report at onthemedia.org, and keep your letters coming to us at onthemedia@wnyc.org, and please don't forget to tell us where you live and how to pronounce your name.

BOB GARFIELD:Up next, the Brazilian media are mad at the American media, and the Indian media are mad at the Indian media. Plus, the Army's latest recruitment tool is only a game.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media, from NPR. BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. With over 650 million voters, elections in India are an extraordinary exercise in democracy. Yet, beyond the spectacle, this year's elections didn't seem too exciting. Unprecedented economic growth and warming relations with Pakistan seemed to ensure a strong majority for Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his ruling party called the BJP. But, as you probably know by now, the pundits and prognosticators got it very, very wrong. The Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi, came out victorious, and India has a new Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. Shailajah Bajpai is a columnist for the Indian Express in New Delhi, and she's been casting a critical eye on the Indian media during this whole drama. Welcome to the show.

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI: Good evening.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, India has had an explosion of media since the last election -- more cable channels, more news in regional languages. With all these new ways to reach the people, first of all why did Vajpayee fail to connect.

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI: Just prior to the election, there was a government advertising initiative which stressed this India Shining feel good factor -that the economy was booming, that there was prosperity in the country. That kind of set the tone for what was going to come.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And India Shining was basically the American-style slogan that was used by the BJP to promote their candidate and their party.

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI:Well, yes, and you know it came from a suit ad. There was a raiment ad which actually talked about looking good, and they coined it from looking good to feel good. So they actually took the slogan from an advertising campaign [LAUGHTER] for suits.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And so was Vajpayee then trying to run an American-style ad campaign and it just didn't fly?

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI:That's what becomes interesting. Mr. Vajpayee was meant to be the selling point of this government, and yet you know I've just been working on a study of the election coverage, and we found that, in fact, in the first month Mr. Vajpayee is missing completely from the media, and yet he was their biggest asset. So they were starting wrong there.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why do you think they made that choice?

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI:It's his age. He's not able to campaign any longer in the manner that he was, and you know, again on the media we saw that very clearly. Then the media campaign of the BJP, which had actually taken the unprecedented form of even, you know, we were all getting phone calls from Mr. Vajpayee.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you're saying that Vajpayee was actually used in an electronic phone campaign--

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI: Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: -- what about Sonia Gandhi's campaign?

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI: When we saw her on television, she was always amongst the people.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Right.

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI:She was seen. And there's another important decision that she took this time, and I think that probably is very important at a level that we didn't know at the time, was that this year she made a decision to give interviews to television -- she made herself available to the media in a manner that she has never done previously. And she spoke in Hindi. It was very important.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's turn to the media now. They blew it as badly as Vajpayee, and yet they had correspondents everywhere, they had polls, and they were completely blindsided.

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI: I think the major reason was that everyone in the urban centers, they all bought into the idea that a) India was shining, so I think the media, which is also urban-based, they bought into that idea - that there's really no contest, so should we go any further?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Why did the polls get it wrong?

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI:I don't think we've still been able to understand that one, but I am going to suggest that I think some of the polls actually were not getting it so wrong. I feel that some of them did not want to come out with it for reasons of political economic survival. I'll tell you something: after the second phase of polling, all the polls showed a drop for the ruling coalition and the Sensex- that's the stock exchange -took a huge beating. You know, there was this immediate dip, and there was this terrible fear: is the media leading to this, and in fact, there was a considerable criticism of the polls and suggest that they, in fact, were ruining the economy and making the stock exchange fall.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I think it says something for Indian democracy that even though the media are very influential, and even though the media got it completely wrong, the people elected the candidate they wanted.

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI: It's very interesting, and I felt very good about this at the end. Everyone told us that this election is only being fought on the electronic media, and in future it will always be fought on the electronic media. I think what's been very positive, perhaps, about this election is that in fact it's not going to be fought on the electronic media. It will be fought where it should be democratically fought, which is at the hustings and on the ground level.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. It was a pleasure talking to you.

SHAILAJAH BAJPAI: Okay, Brooke. Thank you very much.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Shailajah Bajpai is a columnist for the Indian Express. She spoke with us from her home in New Delhi. BOB GARFIELD: Last week, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva dropped his threat to give New York Times Bureau Chief in Brazil, Larry Rohter, the boot. Lula had ordered Rohter's expulsion after the veteran correspondent wrote an article suggesting that there was a national concern in Brazil over Lula's drinking. The Brazilian leader reversed his decision days later, under an avalanche of protest from the Brazilian media and elsewhere on press freedom grounds. Key words: on press freedom grounds. While fighting for Rohter's right to write, the Brazilian media were uniformly critical about the article in question. In fact, according to Brazilian journalist Antonio Brasil, many saw the episode as evidence of the decline and even corruption of American journalism.

ANTONIO BRASIL: One thing is to say anything about a president, you know, and his possible drinking habits. It's another thing when he says that the, the Brazilians were concerned, that -where there was a national concern. Most people say that was not, you know, true. His sources and evaluation in terms of putting together the story would represent some kind of a sloppy journalism or maybe for those who were more into conspiracy somehow that there was something behind. You know, you cannot forget that this is a completely new government. In Brazil this is a Socialist kind of a government for the very, very first time. Lula is from the Worker's Party, and they are very sensitive of any comment, especially coming from America. And you have to think that right now in Latin America -- it's not just in Brazil, but in many parts of the world, the sort of idea of a very strong anti-American feeling.

BOB GARFIELD:I can see how an uninformed public might confuse suspicion with the United States government and its behavior with a newspaper that comes from the United States, but how would journalists in Brazil conflate the United States government's actions with that of the, the New York Times?

ANTONIO BRASIL: Bob, you have to think that when you start to show things that are wrong with recent American journalism, the whole situation of embedded journalists -- for Brazilians, you know, when they watch and they are sort of very well informed about situations like Fox TV, you know, supporting and being very much engaged in American politics, and some of the problems that happened in the New York Times -- you know, the frauds committed by Jayson Blair, maybe the standards are not as high, so for the people to make this connection of political interest, of a conspiracy behind, you know, it's natural. If you're going to do a profile on the president, and if you're going to accuse him, you have to do a much better journalism. You have to have better sources, different sources, and that was one of the main criticisms of the story, is that he listened to very few sources. Those sources were clear enemies of the government somehow. They are from opposition. And that would represent not the standards of American journalism that we expect.

BOB GARFIELD:I understand that this story on the face of it could be used as a weapon by President Lula's political enemies. However, journalism is not supposed to pay a whole lot of attention as to what will happen once a story is reported. Journalists are just supposed to find the news and report it, come what may. Is it normal practice in Brazil to suppress stories for fear that they will be giving aid and comfort to some political party or another?

ANTONIO BRASIL: You have to see, Bob, this is a, a young democracy, you know. We are coming from years of dictatorship, you know, so journalists in Brazil, they are still learning their limits -- to what extent, you know, can you criticize the president in power or the government in power. We don't have the same kind of independence or hundreds of years of democracy somehow that would make journalists bolder.

BOB GARFIELD:Well, I was going to ask you if a Brazilian journalist had written the article that Rohter wrote, would there have been such an uproar, but I guess the question I want to ask you now is: would a Brazilian journalist at this moment in Brazilian history ever have written the article that Larry Rohter published in the New York Times?

ANTONIO BRASIL: Bob, there were a number of articles. What Larry did was just collect here and there little bits and pieces of stories that were in the Brazilian press, but again, it's one thing for the Brazilian press to comment and for one columnist to make an opinion. That would be very clear in Brazilian minds as being part of a political agenda, you know, because it's difficult to prove. But when the New York Times, which is a reference for Brazilian journalists and for international journalism in terms of standards, if it decides to write a story - if you read the story, it's not something that's just giving, you know, he drank three glasses or four glasses -- it's very opinionated, and reveals, for the Brazilians, you know, some kind of a prejudice against, you know, someone who has a completely different background. You know, Brazilian journalists, they will never say -- and that's a main difference in the New York Times -- that was a national concern -- because Brazilians would take that, you know, like we have a completely different culture, we have to understand carnival, you know -- your culture has a relationship with Prohibition and you know, you cannot drink in the streets -- which is completely alien for us. And that's again the problems of foreign journalism -- you report from your own eyes and from your own culture things that are different that maybe you just don't understand.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, Antonio, thank you very much.

ANTONIO BRASIL: Oh, thank you so much.

BOB GARFIELD: Brazilian journalist Antonio Brasil is a visiting scholar at Rutgers University.
ROOKE GLADSTONE: Last week, according to Wired magazine, a group of Army special forces troops staged a simulated assault in front of the L.A. Convention Center. It wasn't a preparedness drill for a potential terrorist attack. No, the troops were dispatched to promote the latest version of America's Army -- a video game designed as a recruitment tool available for free download at Go Army dot com. When the first version of the game came out a year and a half ago, we asked a member of the Army's target audience to give it a try. Marc Delgado of Harlem, New York -- one of WNYC's Radio Rookies, came back with this report.

MARC DELGADO: I graduated high school four months ago, so right now I'm approaching a crossroads, and things could be a little foggy. I'll bet the Army'd love to clear things up for me. I'm, I'm just not feeling the Army like that, but I'm willing to check out the game, to see if it changes my mind.

MAN: Now-- let's see what this is about, let's see, let's see.

MARC DELGADO: But the Army wasn't making it easy for me. [SPEAKING TO HIMSELF] It's loading up a little slow, brother. It's loading up a little slow. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it.

MARC DELGADO: I tried for a few hours to load the game on my computer and couldn't, so I called WNYC computer expert Greg Madias -- and he couldn't get it to load either. I was getting tight! [TO HIMSELF] I want to play the game, man! How you gonna game-play man? I don't like this.

MARC DELGADO: Finally, after hours and hours of trying, we got the game to work!

GAME ANNOUNCER: Good morning, soldier, and welcome to the M16 Qualification Range. Today's task is to qualify with the M16 A2 rifle. [BIRDS SINGING UNDER] The conditions: You will be given 40 targets. [RIFLE FIRE] The standards: Out of 40 targets, you must hit and engage 23 targets in order to qualify as a marksman.

MARC DELGADO: In order to advance in America's Army, you have missions to complete as a soldier in training and tests to pass which include your accuracy with a gun-- [SHOUTED COMMANDS UNDER] speed through and obstacle course, and the dreaded Airborne test--

GROUP OF MEN: [SHOUTING] Airborne!

MARC DELGADO: -- where you have to parachute from thousands of feet in the air into a target circle.

MAN: [SHOUTING] Go!

MARC DELGADO: Each qualification board was 5 minutes. I played that game for 3 hours trying to qualify. So you know what that means. I had to try over and over and over again.

GAME ANNOUNCER: Welcome back to another day of qualification.

MARC DELGADO: So after many, many, many rounds-- [RAPID GUN FIRE] I got the hang of it and qualified.

GAME ANNOUNCER: Congratulations, soldier. You qualified as a marksman in the United States Army.

MARC DELGADO: [TO HIMSELF] That's right, baby. That's right! [MACHINE GUN FIRE]

MARC DELGADO: Then there was more qualification.

GAME ANNOUNCER: Make like a duck and waddle through that tunnel--

MARC DELGADO: There was the obstacle course--

GAME ANNOUNCER: -- you just gave hoohah a new meaning!

MARC DELGADO: [TO HIMSELF/MIMICKING] Ooohah ooh eeeing!

MARC DELGADO: --infantry training and getting to know the burners. In my 'hood that's what we call guns.

GAME ANNOUNCER:Today you will get to fire the M249 squad automatic weapon; the M203 40 mm grenade launcher, and you will get to throw the M67 frag grenade and the M83 smoke grenade.

MARC DELGADO: Sounds pretty hot, right? This is the hottest burner of them all.

GAME ANNOUNCER: This is the M249 saw, a 5.56 mm fully-automatic weapon; can be magazine or belt-fed; has a maximum effective range for a point target of 800 meters and a maximum effective range for an area target of 1000 meters.

MARC DELGADO: I got used to the guns after repeatedly using them. [GUN FIRE UP AND UNDER] Since this is an internet-based game, I played with people from other states as part of my unit, and I shot at people from places like California -- kind of like a East Coast, West Coast rivalry. [LOUD AND HEAVY GUN FIRE] I was having mad fun! [IMITATION BIRD WHOOPING SOUNDS] [GUN FIRE]

MARC DELGADO: [TO HIMSELF] Ohhhhh! But he shot me again?! [GUN FIRE] [LAUGHS] Yaaaaaa ha ha ha -- this game is hot! Whoooooooo. [LAUGHS]

MARC DELGADO: But it's just a game. I'm not all of a sudden motivated to join the Army. That's just me. So I asked my boy Dave if he thinks the video game is a smart move for recruiting.

DAVE: Me personally I would buy the game and disregard anything about recruiting, you feel me? Because the Army, that's not really, you know what I'm saying where I'm at. That's not where my head is at. I mean video games --you know what I'm saying -- it gets a little gimmicky and this -- I mean the Army - making a video game to recruit people, you know what I'm saying, that-- nah. Be I just ain't feeling that.

MARC DELGADO: Dave and I agree. Playing video games is playing video games. You leave it in the computer when you're tired of playing. But my other friend, Mike, feels the Army has the right idea.

MIKE: Just like - when you got a football game - you play the football game - then it gets you hyped -you want to go outside and play football - so I guess that would work the same way. They're playing on like a Navy Seal Game or a Military Game and then they'll get them hyped and they, and they might like it like that - and then they might want to join.

MARC DELGADO: Sergeant First Class Eric Vidal, a recruiting officer in Harlem, says the game is instilling the values of America's soldiers.

SERGEANT FIRST CLASS ERIC VIDAL: It's not just about killing, because in --during this game, if-- You have rules of engagements and rules of war. So if you go into a mission, your job is to complete the mission with the least amount of force possible. Now you could wind up in jail! So-- you know, you have those that go in there, and once they start firing up, they're going to find theirselves penalized and then they're going to have to start following the rules of engagement, the integrity, the values that we have, in order to prosper during the game.

MARC DELGADO: I, I don't know! If you give a teenager a video game with guns, he's going to shoot everything in sight! It's about busting shots!-- to see if the guy looks real when he's dying! If you don't bust first, [GUN FIRE UNDER] they're gonna bust you and you're gonna die! [HEAVIER GUNFIRE]

MARC DELGADO: While I was talking to Sgt. Vidal, I had to ask about the part of the game that bugged me the most.

MARC DELGADO: [WITH SGT VIDAL] The only part that I couldn't complete was the Airborne--

SERGEANT FIRST CLASS ERIC VIDAL: Airborne. [LAUGHS]

MARC DELGADO: -- the live jump. I, I didn't get it. I didn't know how to direct them to the circle. I just kept dropping.

SERGEANT FIRST CLASS ERIC VIDAL: The, the Airborne -- that's probably the best feature that we have right now -- it's because it's so hard to dominate like the real life experience is. Like when you're coming off the tower in, in the Airborne training, that is really the tower, and if you're ever in that situation, and you do go to Airborne training, you will see the trees just the way they are, you will see the tower just the way it is -- I mean they went to Fort Benning, Georgia; they shot the footage from all angles, and they tried to keep it true to life.

MARC DELGADO: That's what I'm scared of! It's so true to life. I died 15 times in the game, just trying to qualify! How could that encourage anyone? It's a really good game, and I play a lot of them. I will play the game again, without a doubt, but I was definitely not convinced to join the Army. And I have to say--: if enlisting in the U.S. Army is as hard as downloading and installing the game America's Army, then the military's got some serious problems. For On the Media, I'm Marc Delgado III. [THEME MUSIC]

BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Janeen Price, Megan Ryan and Tony Field, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director, and Rob Christiansen our engineer; we had help from Derek John, to whom we bid a fond farewell. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG]