Thursday
And Then There Were Three
The current sensation sweeping the blogosphere is to guess how many journalists have been paid by the Bush Administration to promote Adminstration policy as an independent voice without disclosing that they were paid to do it. So far there have been three. The most recent one to come out is Michael McManus, Salon has the story. He was paid $10,000 to promote marriage iniatives. If you haven't been paying attention, the original story (and still the most egregious) was Armstrong Williams beind paid $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind. USA Today broke that one. The second one to come out was Maggie Gallagher, who was advocating the constitutional amendment against gay marriage and other marriage related policies. She was paid $21,500. Her case, while still unethical, doesn't look as bad as the other two. She wasn't paid to advocate for the policy, but rather to consult on the development of the policy in the first place. Actually, that might be worse. It seems like she wrote articles advocating policy she helped design without disclosing her role in designing it. That story broke in the Washington Post. The next story will either be the Washington Times finding an example of Clinton having done this, or the New York Times finding two paid by the Bush Administration. That or a Murdoch owned paper finding a way to connect the stories to either a headless body sex/nudity, or both.
(Hat tip on the Salon story: BitchPhd).
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(Hat tip on the Salon story: BitchPhd).
