The Longer View

[struggle4progress]

It Helps to Remember that the Wolves Arrive in Sheepskins

By Brian Montopoli

One of the most striking developments to come out of the three payola flaps involving conservative pundits that have surfaced recently -- the first involving Armstrong Williams, who took $240,000 from the Department of Education to promote the No Child Left Behind initiative, the second involving Maggie Gallagher, who agreed to a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the Bush administration's marriage initiative, and the third involving Mike McManus, who took $4,000 from HHS to "train marriage mentors," and subsequently pushed Bush's marriage initiative in his columns -- has been just how surprised the participants seem to be at the uproar that has greeted the exposure of their actions. Williams, in the words of USA Today, which broke the story, said "he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical," but that he believed in the program he was being paid to promote, so he did it anyway. Gallagher, in a moment she surely now regrets, asked Howard Kurtz, who broke the story about her HHS connection in the Washington Post, to tell her whether or not she had violated journalistic ethics. And McManus said he didn't think the fact that he was being paid as a consultant for an entity he was ostensibly independently commenting upon was "relevant" information.

Last Wednesday, Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris wrote in a post on the magazine's Web site that the reactions of Williams and Gallagher signal that "the ascendant class of conservative pundit-operatives looks upon old strictures of behavior with a kind of incomprehension, even contempt." (The McManus case had not yet come to light.) Certainly, there does seem to be a feeling developing among some politicians and commentators on the take that the old, honor-based standards of journalism have grown quaint.

Partisans, of course, want to dominate the political discourse, and part of their wide-ranging strategy is to fool the public with ostensibly independent front men and women who are financially or ideologically motivated to play along. But the problem goes far beyond Williams, Gallagher and McManus. Much less recognized -- but more widespread -- has been the infiltration of the nation's op-ed pages by agents too clever to attract the "payola" tag. James Glassman, who is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, founded an organization called Tech Central Station, and in doing so he "reinvented journalism -- as lobbying," as Nick Confessore put it. Last year, a Glass-penned op-ed appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch attacking the documentary "Super Size Me," which details how a steady diet of fast food led to health problems for documentarian Morris Spurlock. Glassman failed to disclose in his piece that McDonald's is one of the companies that pays for Tech Central Station. (The Post-Dispatch subsequently apologized to readers.) On Dec. 12, as we noted before, an op-ed by Tech Central Station editor Nick Schultz appeared in the Los Angeles Times arguing that "at some level, science probably will never resolve what to do about global warming." Schultz failed to disclose that Tech Central Station is partially funded by ExxonMobil, which opposes legislation that would regulate gases that contribute to global warming. <snip>

In truth, in the world of op-eds, almost everyone has a vested interest -- either ideological or financial -- in their chosen topic. Transparency is essential, but efforts to resist it continue unabated. Often a writer will submit a piece as a freelancer, even though he or she has a tie to a particular industry or organization. Only with diligent research -- and a fair amount of luck -- can an editor uncover the writer's connections. Some writers, even those from reputable think tanks, also consciously cook the books to help their case. Timpane recalls a submission from a writer arguing that there exists scientific evidence that abortion leads to higher rates of breast cancer. He would have run it, but he realized that the "science" on which this evidence was based was dubious, since the experiment lacked a control group. He confronted the writer, who admitted the science was weak, and eventually concluded that that this person was a shill for Christian conservatives who were more interested in pushing an ideology than telling the truth. Timpane barred the writer from his pages. <snip>

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