Wednesday, January 26, 2005
(10:37 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Pundit Payola?
This guy, one of several interlopers at Kevin Drum's blog (helpfully distinguished from Kevin's own posts by larger type), is disturbed at the "growing scandal" of conservative pundits taking money from the executive branch to promote Bush administration policies:What's striking about this emerging payola scandal is the aggressive cluelessness of the participants towards basic standards of journalistic decency. Remember how Armstrong Williams claimed never to have considered that it might be wrong to take a quarter million dollars of government money to promote the administration's education policies as an "independent" opinion journalist and not, at the very least, disclose the fact? Gallagher betrayed the same indifference when confronted by Kurtz. "Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?...I don't know. You tell me."This post isn't so much an attempt to deride conservatives for their lack of journalistic ethics -- something that shouldn't surprise us, given that so-called "journalistic ethics" is what gave us the flagrantly liberal media -- as an attempt to cash in. President Bush, do you or one of your underlings have a policy you want me to promote? I'd be more than happy to help. I'd gladly accept the $21,500 you paid syndicated columnist and pro-wedlock guru Maggie Gallagher to promote your policies -- that would easily cover my student loans from the MA and put me in a great financial position going into the doctorate (i.e., a net worth that is just barely positive, rather than distinctly negative). The fact that "taxpayer money" would be used essentially to pay back "taxpayer money" previously lent to me would render the whole situation significantly less morally suspect.
This is an attitude you're seeing a lot of today in Washington. The ascendant class of conservative pundit-operatives looks upon old strictures of behavior with a kind of incomprehension, even contempt.
(That parenthetical remark about "so-called 'journalistic ethics'" was a taste of the kind of effective, party-line rhetoric you can expect from me, Mr. President. Let me know.)
