President George Bush issued an order today that probably will NOT end a controversy that has all the earmarks of a story with "legs": he formally ordered his cabinet not to pay big bucks to columnists to tout administration policies.
The reason the story has what Hollywood calls "legs" (staying power, a gift that keeps giving and giving) is that GWB’s proclamation — coming amid TWO high profile cases now of supposedly principled columnists getting money that was NOT disclosed except through press reports — keeps the tantalizing question alive: who ELSE was getting it…and for what?
The issue is not merely the payments. The issue is the furtive NATURE of these payments because if there was nothing unseemly about it you would not have to have read about it in a now-it-can-be-told style press report.
But the bottom line is that these payments were never ever supposed to be public knowledge because that would have diluted the messages these folks were delivering to their readers and listeners– because if their audiences knew they would have then perhaps thought that the columnists were being compromised by getting fat administration checks bigger than many Americans make in a whole year.
Here’s what happened today:
President Bush on Wednesday ordered his Cabinet secretaries not to hire columnists to promote their agendas after disclosure that a second writer was paid to tout an administration initiative.
The president said he expects his agency heads will "make sure that that practice doesn’t go forward."
"All our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet," Bush said at a news conference.
Bush’s remarks came a day after syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher apologized to readers for not disclosing a $21,500 contract with the Health and Human Services Department to help create materials promoting the agency’s $300 million initiative to encourage marriage.
Bush also said the White House had been unaware that the Education Department paid commentator and columnist Armstrong Williams $240,000 to plug its policies. That contract came to light two weeks ago.
Bush said there "needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press."
And he noted that "we have new leadership going into the Department of Education."
Prediction: the story will continue if the news media finds more instances of ideologically friendly commentators who were cultivated and financially lubricated to ensure that they stayed on message with their audiences, who were unwittingly reading and listening to pieces written by closet administration flacks.
The defense "we didn’t say anything because we weren’t asked" just doesn’t hold water here. It seemed to be take the money, don’t advertise it, and run…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.