Orson Welles would be proud. Or maybe just disgusted. Welles’ 1937 radio broadcast of the dramatic reading of “War of the Worlds” sent many impressionable listeners into panic, convinced the show was a true news broadcast and alien spaceships threatened American skies.

And while the federal government hasn’t quite stooped quite to that level, a recent campaign promoting President Bush’s Medicare proposal has definitely taken a cue from “War of the Worlds.” The Department of Health and Human Services has created “video news releases” which present Bush’s Medicare plan in the form of news segments, two of which end with the voice of a woman saying “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.”

Ryan explains the benefits of the new law, while a pharmacist talking to an elderly customer promotes the plan, saying it is “A very good idea.”

But, as reported in The New York Times, the production company, Home Front Communications, said it had hired “Karen Ryan” to read a script prepared by the government.

The videos are meant to be used in local television news programs, especially the small-market stations that suffer from lack of reporting staff. It was actually broadcast as a news segment in several stations in Oklahoma, Louisiana and other states.

The General Accounting Office determined the television news segments were a legal, effective way to educate beneficiaries, although Gary L. Kepplinger, deputy counsel for the accounting office, said he was “actively considering some follow-up work related to the materials,” according to The New York Times.

The question is, why did the federal government feel it had to actively market a ethically questionable

“news segment” to the public? Video news releases are nothing new — pharmaceutical companies have effectively used them to produce news-style health features about diseases their drugs can cure, and government agencies have used them to address topics like teenage smoking.

But this is promoting a specific, somewhat partisan policy plan — hardly as universal as “Teens shouldn’t smoke.”

Also in question are the ethics of the television news stations that aired the segment. It may have looked like a news report, but any journalist worth his or her salt isn’t going to air a paid advertisement in the middle of a news broadcast, no matter how hard up for material they are.

The news stations and the government worked together to present fraudulent information to the American public under the guise of an impartial news report.