CNN political commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin said Friday on “The Situation Room” that a taxpayer-funded video from the Trump administration criticizing communism resembles state propaganda of the kind produced in China or Iran.
Host Wolf Blitzer introduced the segment by noting the administration is calling the video a public service announcement, or PSA. After the network aired the ad, Blitzer asked Farah Griffin for her reaction and noted that American taxpayers are paying to have it broadcast on various TV networks.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in America, where tax dollars are essentially doing state propaganda on behalf of the federal government,” Farah Griffin said. “Listen, it’s one thing when this White House wants to do hype videos on Twitter, I think they have every right to do that. I think that’s within the realm of normal political speech. But to be paying to put ads on the air that are essentially touting the U.S. government feels very, very similar to something you’d frankly see in China, in Iran, and in other, much more repressive regimes.”
Farah Griffin also addressed a separate point of criticism aimed at the White House: its handling of a recent summit with the Chinese president.
“There’s been quite a bit of criticism of just the degree to which the president and the White House are wanting to really celebrate the Chinese president,” she said. “Whether it’s the president greeting him at the airport when he arrived, something that was not an honor that the Chinese government had given to President Trump. Whether it was literally rolling out the red carpet, when you know that there are human rights abuses taking place, you know there are people who are being held as political prisoners in China. There’s the Uyghur Muslims who have been detained and abused and some really horrific things happening. It’s an odd moment when we’re trying to signal what American values are, and I’m not sure that they’re coming across in this summit.”
The exchange raises a question that ought to matter regardless of party: what limits, if any, apply to the federal government spending public money to broadcast its own political messaging on the airwaves. Farah Griffin drew a distinction between social media posts from the White House, which she said fall within normal political speech, and paid television advertising funded by taxpayers, which she said crosses a different line.
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