• Originally published in The Guardian (London) February 7, 2005

Copyright 2005 Guardian Newspapers Limited

Paying the Republican piper: The dubious financial activities of a clutch of right-wing American journalists have further dented the credibility of the media.

By: David Teather


Michael McManus awoke on January 28 to find himself on the front page of USA Today, offered up as the latest example in a steadily escalating scandal. McManus - the author of a column called Ethics & Religion, syndicated in 26 American newspapers - was accused of being anything but ethical. He had accepted money from government departments on behalf of his organisation, Marriage Savers, while at the same time praising the Bush administration's pro-marriage initiative in his columns.

He has also penned features praising Bush's religious beliefs and, ahead of November's election, questioned the faith of his Democratic rival, John Kerry. The inference was that McManus had been bought.

The subject of his latest column, published last weekend, was to ask for the forgiveness of his readers.

"It never occurred to me that I should say something (about the government contract) in my column," he told the Guardian. "What I did was an oversight. We didn't take money inappropriately. I was not hired to do public relations for this administration. I'm thunderstruck. I've never had my integrity questioned."

He has, he noted, also been critical of Bush, over environmental policy.

So far he has been dropped by three newspapers that carried his column.

The incident might never have come to light had it not been for the case of Armstrong Williams.

It emerged last month that Williams, a well-known African-American pundit, had received $ 240,000 to promote government education policies to the black community and to encourage other journalists to do the same. Williams describes himself as a principled voice for conservative and Christian values.

Williams, 45, was paid by the education department via the public relations agency Ketchum to promote its No Child Left Behind programme. His contract demanded that he regularly comment on the scheme in his nationally syndicated television, radio and newspaper spots. As part of the deal, he had to interview the former education secretary Rod Paige, who is also black.

Shortly after the Williams scandal broke, columnist Maggie Gallagher - another marriage expert who recently called on the administration to fund programmes helping homosexuals overcome their "sexual dysfunction" - was also discovered to have done work for the government while praising its policies in print. Gallagher was another outspoken Kerry critic.

Taken together, the three cases have provoked uproar among Bush critics and been presented as further evidence of a government that has done all it can to bend the press to its agenda.

"Armstrong Williams was the most egregious but they are all serious," says Melanie Sloan, of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a lobby group in Washington. "All three alleged journalists were being paid by the government to support the administration's views without any kind of disclosure and that's illegal. I think there are more out there. These are just the ones we've heard about so far."

Williams is now trying to put the scandal behind him. A call to his office was passed to an assistant. "He's focusing on trying to keep his business going and is not commenting."

He was not so shy at first. In the wake of the scandal breaking, Williams appeared on the cable news channel CNN. He said he could not recall whether he had ever declared his contract with the government but that he had "an obligation to be more vociferous about the fact". He conceded that he could "certainly understand why people would think it was unethical". Ketchum has refused to comment.

Democrat George Miller, on the house education committee, has called for an investigation. "It's propaganda, it's unethical, it's dangerous, it's illegal", he said. "It's worthy of Pravda."

Bush publicly disavowed the practice of paying pundits. "Our agenda ought to stand on its own two feet," he told a news conference. He said there "needs to be a nice independent relationship" between the White House and the press.

But this is not the first time that the administration's aggressive news management has been called into question.

In the most glaring instance, the government has twice recently been found guilty of breaking the law by dis tributing fake news bulletins to broadcasters on subjects including drug abuse and drug prescription benefits. The pre-packaged news segments feature actors posing as journalists, come with a "suggested live intro" for anchors to read, and they end with the usual reporter sign-off.

The Bush administration is also famously tight-lipped and leery of the press. In his first term, Bush gave fewer press conferences than any president since William Howard Taft, who served until 1913. At the same time, the Bush administration certainly understands the value of the media. A report commissioned by Democrat Nancy Pelosi when the Williams scandal broke found the administration last year spent $ 88m on PR agencies, up from $ 37m in Bill Clinton's last year in office.

There has been further fallout from the Williams episode at the Washington Post, which has been engaged in an internal row over the work of one of that newspaper's columnists, Charles Krauthammer. The paper reported that he and another commentator had been invited to help craft the president's inaugural address, afterwards praising it without disclosing their involvement. Krauthammer has denied the allegation.

Tom Rosenstiel, of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, says the paying or co-opting of journalists is part of a pattern of thinking in the Bush administration that the press is something that needs to be controlled or subdued. He cites Iraq, where the Pentagon has closed one local newspaper, set up websites that look like Arab newspapers and a local TV station to compete with Al Jazeera.

"Historically, Democrats have believed journalists can be persuaded. Republicans think they can't win because they have less affinity with the press. It is a lost cause, an antagonist that can't be trusted and needs to be subverted. Republicans have always used the idea that there is a liberal bias in the media, but that has been a myth propagated for a purpose. They believe there is a need to create an alternative that is partisan and conservative."

The result, he says, "is that you have a mainstream media that is trying to be independent and then you have a conservative, partisan media. There is no Democratic equivalent of Fox News."

Equally problematic is the effect the latest scandals are having on US jour nalistic credibility at a time when public faith has been dented by the inventions of Jayson Blair at the New York Times, similar allegations against Jack Kelley of USA Today, and the faked documents that tripped up Dan Rather at CBS.

Gallagher got $ 21,500 for writing a series of brochures and presentations promoting marriage. She also apologised in a column for not disclosing the fact. McManus's group got $ 10,200 from the department of health and human services plus $ 49,000 from a group that received a federal grant to encourage unwed parents to marry.

The amount is irrelevant, says Bob Steele, a media ethics expert at the Poynter Institute for media studies. "The principle in jeopardy is independence. Journalists are responsible for seeking and reporting the truth and we should not be compromising that duty by working for the government."

The Democrats are introducing a bill to toughen up laws governing propaganda. Investigations from the congressional government accountability office and the education department are under way.

"Bush has made numerous jokes about how he can't trust the media," adds Rosenstiel. "I think he believes what he says when he talks about freedom and democracy but for some reason this administration doesn't appreciate the role the free press plays in freedom and democracy."

Maggie Gallagher (above) at a senate hearing and Armstrong Williams (below) Main photo: Dennis Cook/AP