Hunting "Propaganda," GOP Watchdog Sets Sights on Obama's New Media

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Ben Smith points us to a provocative congressional report released this morning that suggests that Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Government Oversight Committee, is taking his new-media tinged investigation of the Obama administration to new levels.

Ben focuses on the parts where Issa targets Justice Department new media point person Tracy Russo (perhaps best known in these parts for being the instigator behind the insta-classic "John McCain is aware of the Internet") for allegedly leaving anonymous comments on blog posts that were critical of the administration, something that the Justice Department has denied having happened.

The report, though, is far broader than that, a scattershot effort to pull various parts of the Obama administration's tech-empowered media strategy and efforts into a coherent case for the idea that this presidency engages in "propaganda" at new levels. Presidents have long engaged in propagandistic work, of course, and Issa highlights everything from the FDR-era's Works Progress Administration's pro-New Deal murals to the video news releases that became a major issue during the George W. Bush administration.

But the new media environment, and the Obama administration's efforts in engaging in it, introduce some new, modern, blurry lines into the mix. You'd be hard pressed, to pick a somewhat trivial example, to find a normal citizen who might make the distinction that while the @WhiteHouse account on Twitter is owned and operated by the Executive Office of the President, @BarackObama is controlled by Organizing for America, which is itself a unit of the Democratic National Committee.

And what's the Internet without the "self-aggrandizement" and "puffery" that GAO has identified as potentially offending propaganda?

Issa, in his 37-page reports, calls out administration officials for a range of supposedly problematic behavior, from a HealthReform.gov (a site frozen after the passage of health reform legislation) that encouraged people to back an effort to drive health insurance reform in a way that also buildings federal emailing lists, to the blind emailing out of talking points by a Department of Education staffer, to a Recovery.gov site that is promoted in everything from official speeches to road-side logos and signs -- and that, critics have argued, contains misleading, inaccurate, or partial data.

"Using the resources of the federal government to activate a sophisticated propaganda and lobbying campaign," reads the Issa report, "is an abuse of office and a betrayal of the President's pledge to create 'an unprecedented level of openness in Government.'"

Some of Issa's charges ring more serious, and substantiated, than others. But, and from a personal perspective, as a former staffer in a past life for the very same congressional committee which Issa is using to pursue these efforts, it has seemed predictable in recent months and years that the Obama administration's digital efforts would eventual come in for closer scrutiny, providing for a time-lag as investigators and adversaries catch up on the innovations happening in that space. Congressional investigators love a written record, and the thousands of tweets, blog posts, and other online content flowing forward from a modern presidency seems to provide an easily-mineable one.

The State Department alone, for example, produced more online content in the first nine months of the Obama administration than it did in the entire eight years of the Bush presidency, according to a recent IG report.

And Issa, a fairly tireless pursuer, seems to have new media in his sights. One of his other on-going investigations has to do with digging into how a Deputy U.S. CTO has used his Gmail account, an investigation inspired, in part, by the comments made over Google Buzz.

Here's the full text of Issa's report (pdf).