Nothing good ever results from being audited. The recent results from a White House audit conducted by the Government Accountability Office reaffirms that.

But what is scary is the amount of wrongs uncovered in the investigation. And as everyone has been told “Two wrongs [or three, or four, or nine] don’t make a right.”

Federal auditors discovered President Bush’s administration used more than $140,000 to pay journalists to speak, write and report on behalf of the Education Department and the No Child Left Behind act.

Here’s why it’s interesting.

Using federal funds for partisan political purposes is illegal. So illegal that the GAO labeled the acts “covert propaganda.” Wrong No.1.

The media outlets that ran the “news” stories never credited the government as the author of the video press releases and articles. Wrong No.2.

The media took the lie of omission a step further, and allowed people like Karen Ryan, a narrator of several TV pieces who was also on the government’s payroll, to say things like, “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.” Hardly unbiased, fully-disclosed reporting. Wrong No.3.

At a January press conference, Bush said, “We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda,” after rumblings of behind-closed-doors deals surfaced. Wrong No.4.

In summation, the president used tax-payers’ money illegally to fund faux news aimed to foward his agenda while crooked journalists turned a blind eye to ethics and allowed it to go on for quite some time, just before covering a press junket where Bush lied blatantly about his party’s involvement.

Can it get worse? Of course.

This administration did not only pay shady journalists for words in articles and segments on the evening news. It also paid commentators on talk shows to speak well of certain issues and hired a public relations firm to mull over articles to indicate in which publications, and at what frequency, Republican issues were mentioned in a favorable light.

The boundaries of journalistic integrity, public relations trickery and the White House have blurred so much, the Education Department had been in crisis mode for months before the release of the audit results.

A spokeswoman for the department said secretary Margaret Spelling regarded the controversial issues as “stupid, wrong and ill-advised.”

What a great PR move. How much did that cost?

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