CNN is shocked — shocked! — that conservative talk radio commentator and its own not infrequent guest talking head, Armstrong Williams, is on the Bush administration payroll.
Oh!pinion is hardly suprised. Williams is the perfect Bush & Co. hire. Williams is unfailingly loyal, doesn’t criticize or ask unwelcome questions and seemingly has never heard a Bush statement, plan, proposal or idea he wasn’t in complete, proactive agreement with.
What’s more, Williams’ voice, name, opinions, influence and air time are for sale.
Fair question: If Williams’ supportive talk was bought for $240,000, how much, if anything, is the Bush administration paying Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Neil Boortz, etc., for their hot-air support?
Nor is there any surprise here that the Bush administration would see nothing wrong with hiring a radio commentator to create administration propaganda pieces to be passed off as news presentations.
Nor is there any surprise here that the Bush administration would additionally require its well-paid mouthpiece to bring people on his radio show to talk up the administration’s selected topic, in ways approved by the administration.
Nor is there any surprise here that the Bush administration would set this up so that Williams’ audience is never told he was hired to talk about the topic and to say what he’s saying. In other words, that they are listening to paid political announcements, not news and commentary.
Appearing in a couple of CNN segments today, including “Crossfire,” Williams readily admitted he’d made an error in judgment but protested he believes in and supports (again, no surprise) Bush’s ironically named No Child Left Behind program. Williams’ claim begs the question, If you’re so gung ho about No Child Left Behind, why didn’t you agree to do promos about it for free, as a public service, instead of pocketing $240,000 in taxpayers’ money?
That logical question wasn’t put to Williams straight out on “Crossfire.” Co-host Paul Begala seemed too busy praising Williams for being forthcoming about bad judment and Bob Novak was at the same time croaking, quaking and repeating incoherent phrases in an unsuccessful effort to come up with a butt-covering riposte of some sort.
The question that was put to Williams was why, since he agrees he erred in becoming an undercover flack for the Bush administration, doesn’t he give the $240,000 back? Williams’ answer was at once clear and opaque. The murky part concerned the “why” query. The emphatically clear part was that he’s not about to give that money back.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, again, no surprise.
A good story on this by AP education writer Ben Feller includes other ethical breaches going back to 2003 on the administration’s part in trying to sneakily sell its policies and programs to the voting and taxpaying public:
“The Bush administration has promoted No Child Left Behind with a video that comes across as a news story but fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money. It has also has paid for rankings of newspaper coverage of the law, with points awarded for stories that say Bush and the Republican Party are strong on education. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, is investigating those spending decisions.
“The GAO has twice ruled that the Bush administration’s use of prepackaged videos — to promote federal drug policy and a new Medicare law — is “covert propaganda” because the videos do not make clear to the public that the government produced the promotional news.
” ‘There is no defense for using taxpayer dollars to pay journalists for ‘fake news’ and favorable coverage of a federal program,’ said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group that has tracked the department’s spending.”
The next logical question even conservative Republicans ought to be asking, but won’t, is, If Bush and his people misrepresented their promos and behaved deviously on the prescription drug fiasco and on No Child Left Behind, what else are they misrepresenting and hiding?
Fifty-one percent of the American electorate is getting in Bush what it wants and deserves for national leadership. The hell of it is that those of us in the other 49 percent are condemned to the same lousy fate.
