Bush's Education Dept. paid commentator to promote law

I mean, this is terrible. Terrible.

Propaganda is one of the major problems with (I don't want to use the word 'facist,' because that raises people's hackles apparantly) 'bad governments.' People should be incensed that their money went to such a thing.

At least you have the option of not watching CBS if you don't like Dan Rather... but how do you know who to trust or not when the Goddamn Administration is paying off the so-called 'pundits' that appear on pretty much every network? You can't! It's insane.

This whole country is f*cked right now.

Cycloptichorn

You get some perspective, Tico!

How many times has this happened? How do you know who is being paid and who isn't? You don't.

Imagine if it had been the left paying a pundit off like this, you'd be sh*tting your pants talking about how wrong it is. Armstrong never once mentioned the fact that he was paid to talk about it. There is no evidence that he was a supporter of NCLB before he got the money. And now we're supposed to believe that he didn't change his tune for cash? Please.

Forget the politics of the situation, this sort of thing is terrible for the solvency of the media, which is a critical part of the governmental process. Start mixing the gov't with the media, and bad things are going to happen.

Cycloptichorn

Consider the memos in question. They were supposed to have been written by Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, now dead, who supervised Bush in the Guard. We know Killian's name was on them. We don't know whether the memos were forged, authentic, or some combination thereof. Indeed, they could be fake but accurate, as Killian's secretary, Marian Carr Knox, told CBS on September 15. We don't know through what process they wound up in the possession of a former Guardsman, Bill Burkett, who gave them to the star CBS producer Mary Mapes. Who really wrote them? Theories abound: The Kerry campaign created the documents. CBS's source forged them. Karl Rove planted them. They were real. Some of them were real. They were recreations of real documents. The bottom line, which credible document examiners concede, is that copies cannot be authenticated either way with absolute certainty. The memos that were circulated online were digitized, scanned, faxed, and copied who knows how many times from an unknown original source. We know less about this story than we think we do, and less than we printed, broadcast, and posted.

When it comes to journalistic ethics, I have never been a goody-goody, eat-your-spinach type. I don't get weepy when journalists are forced to testify about crimes they have witnessed, and I don't look to the Columbia Journalism School as some sort of secular Vatican. Journalism is a job, occasionally a calling, but never a priesthood.

So don't mistake anything I'm about to say as the sort of snooty righteousness we've come to expect from the Brahmins of the fourth estate. I'm disgusted with the whole scene. In one corner we have a print and TV commentator more or less secretly taking taxpayer money from the White House to shill for a piece of legislation during an election year. In his defense, he claims that he's not the only one to download lucre from the administration in exchange for advocacy. "This happens all the time," he said. But when David Corn of the Nation asked him who else does this sort of thing, Williams replied "I'm not going to defend myself that way."

Uh, Armstrong, you're not defending yourself. The "everybody does it" defense is no defense at all - a point someone who talks about character a lot should realize. But it is an offense - an offense to everybody he impugns with a vague accusation of corruption. I resent the insinuation, no matter how indirectly it's aimed at me. The White House - which at a minimum should be mortified - says this is an isolated event, and it probably is. Williams is, after all, a K-Street entrepreneur as much as he is - or was - a commentator. There just aren't that many Williams clones on the right. But, alas, the White House's word isn't good enough. Congress should investigate, and the media should rain FOIA requests on the White House to make sure nothing else like this is happening.

But while Williams' transgression is outrageous, I could do without all of the liberals doing their Captain Renault impersonations, proclaiming to be "shocked" that journalistic ethics are lapsing among conservatives. How much money did Paul Krugman take from Enron?

Yes, let's see how many more Armstrongs there are, but let's not ignore, say, Jesse Jackson, a syndicated columnist who had a TV show on CNN and now has one on cable. Jackson and his organizations have taken millions from Democratic administrations over the years, eliciting little more than yawns from the press. Of course, if Williams had disclosed fully his relationship with the White House, there'd be no scandal. Which does partially illuminate the irony of Paul Begala righteously grilling Williams on "Crossfire," even though Begala had remained on air as a TV host while he served as a Kerry campaign advisor.

Democrats in the House have been trying to leverage the Williams affair into a broadside against the "propaganda" machine of the White House. They cite these tacky "video news releases" pumped out by the Drug Czar's office and the Department of Health and Human Services as further proof of the Goebbelsization of the White House. (The "VNRs" look like real news broadcasts.) I think these things are awful, but, again, spare me the shock. Not only did the Clinton administration produce some 26 VNRs, it took propaganda to an unprecedented level when they offered incentives (aka bribes) to the entertainment arms of the television networks so that they would deliberately change the storylines of TV dramas to reflect messages consistent with administration drug policies. You didn't know it, but "ER," "Touched by An Angel" and others adulterated their scripts to please what amounted to nanny-state censors.

Then, of course, there's Dan Rather. Nowhere does the priesthood mentality reign so absolutely as at CBS News. This week it issued a whitewash of a report that blamed the Memogate fiasco not on bad motives or partisanship, but on the all-purpose blame-cleanser, "haste." Former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, leader of the independent panel investigating the affair, said: "If you're looking for a villain in this story, we have one. It's haste; the haste with which this program was put together."

Note: Mary Mapes, the producer most responsible, had been working on this story for five years. To pin this all on "haste" is like saying a man who suffered a five-year bout of consumption died "suddenly" when his heart stopped.

The CBS report insists that partisan bias was simply an appearance problem, not a reality problem. And it refuses to settle the central issue of the scandal: the patent inauthenticity of the forged guard memos. Meanwhile, the report says Rather's "blogger" critics were driven by a "conservative agenda," even though the vast bulk of their commentary centered on such technical details of vintage typewriters. Translation: Elite liberal journalists never have agendas, even when they're peddling and defending lies. Conservatives always have an agenda, even when they're trading in facts.

Now, the Williams fiasco may be more outrageous, but it's also more discrete and therefore fixable. The payola problem is solved by enforcing the existing laws and standards of full-disclosure for journalists and government alike. As for the systemic failures of the media and the arrogance which perpetuates it, that's a tougher nut to crack.

source

For CBS News, the only path back to anything near first place will require a compass setting based in objectivity and quality.

Or it can sulk and feel victimized and drift even further into a partisan milieu with an even smaller but highly dedicated audience.

I'd bet on the former. The stockholders bought into broadcasting. Not narrowcasting. The market will prevail.

In this case, that's a good thing. For CBS and for the news business.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

I mean, this is terrible. Terrible.

Propaganda is one of the major problems with (I don't want to use the word 'facist,' because that raises people's hackles apparantly) 'bad governments.' People should be incensed that their money went to such a thing.

At least you have the option of not watching CBS if you don't like Dan Rather... but how do you know who to trust or not when the Goddamn Administration is paying off the so-called 'pundits' that appear on pretty much every network? You can't! It's insane.

This whole country is f*cked right now.

Cycloptichorn

Gather a little perspective. I'm not an apologist for this, by any means, but don't delude yourself into making this something it's not. Armstrong shouldn't have taken the money, IMO, but he doubtless believed the subject matter of the issue in the first instance. He did not "take a bribe" that caused his mind to change. His behavior, while not appropriate, was not nearly as dishonest as CBS. Armstrong, as I understand it, is known as a conservative pundit -- he takes a side ... and everyone knows which side that is. He does not claim to be an unbiased journalist. You certainly have the choice of tuning him out if you don't like his politics.

CBS/Rather, on the other hand, does claim to be unbiased, yet they attempted to sway an election using forged documents, trying to pass these documents off as truth. Many people of all political beliefs listen to CBS (or used to) because they thought they would receive unbiased journalism.

...
Hypocrisy is alive and well in Washington State. Don't you find it interesting that, in Washington State, Republicans are calling for a third recount of the vote for governor because their candidate lost a close vote. If it were the Democrats who were complaining, the Republicans would be demanding that they stop whining and get over it.

BBB

Now, the Williams fiasco may be more outrageous, but it's also more discrete and therefore fixable. The payola problem is solved by enforcing the existing laws and standards of full-disclosure for journalists and government alike.

Armstrong Williams: tip of the iceberg?

A week into the controversy over the Department of Education's $240,000 buyout of conservative pundit Armstrong Williams, Secretary of Education Rod Paige has entered the fray.

"Over the past week," Paige writes in a Education Dept. press release, "it has been reported that the Department of Education used the communications services of a nationally known commentator to inform the public about the No Child Left Behind law.

"The funds for the Graham Williams Group's services went exclusively toward the production and airtime of advertisements in which I described the law and encouraged viewers and listeners to call the Department's toll-free information line. The funds covered those costs alone and nothing more."

That, apparently, is how one politely cops to paying off a pundit. But an article in USA Today -- which obtained a copy of the agreement between the two parties using a Freedom of Information Act request -- shows that Paige's explanation isn't right. The contract between the Department of Education and Williams stipulated that he "comment regularly on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts' and 'encourage the producers' of a cable TV program, America's Black Forum, to do the same." In other words, while Paige insists that the Department simply bought $240,000 worth of ads, the Department's own contract clearly proves that it paid for a piece of Williams.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Ketchum Public Relations, the PR firm which arranged for the Williams contract, has published a column in PR Week insinuating that Williams may be far from the only commentator on the take:

"On the surface, Williams' unusual role as both a pundit and information source -- through his ad-production firm -- would seem to blur the lines that once so clearly defined journalism and news organizations.

"Now, while our industry could never unanimously pinpoint the moment when this blurring began, every one of us would surely agree that the meshing grows with each passing day… Infotainment goes head-to-head with edutainment, sportscasters double as product pitchmen, and paid political advisors double as paid political pundits.

"Though Ketchum is currently under the microscope, the PR industry at large is about to be viewed through a telescope. For starters, a public-interest group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to 22 government agencies, including all cabinet agencies, requesting copies of all contracts with PR firms."

If CCRE's requests turn up half as much as Ray Kotcher's op-ed suggests they might, more talking heads may roll. And if the Freedom of Information Act doesn't do it, then maybe the FCC's newly launched investigation will.