Bravo to Michele Malkin for taking a firm, unbending, principled stand against the news that commentator Armstrong Williams got a nice, big fat paycheck from the Bush administration to shill its education programs (a fact we would not have known about had not USA Today reported it).
We have to add this:
Some months ago we lost a reader who was furious because we have Malkin on our Right Voices blogroll. He violently disagreed with her on some things and felt The Moderate Voice shouldn’t offer her site, that this meant we endorsed her every idea. So he said he’d stop reading this site (he used to leave a lot of well-thought-out comments).
We hate to lose readers but Malkin’s remarkable, blunt defense of a PRINCIPLE for commentators and journalists — you don’t get take payoffs to use certain sources or pitch someone’s views — more than justifies our loss of a reader.(FOOTNOTE: a) Reading and thinking about opposing views, even those we don’t agree with, doesn’t cause brain cancer..b)We will not blogroll blogs that attack us personally but we have no problems with those with differing ideas. c)The Moderate Voice puts on his blogroll whomever he wants.)
How can you stand on principle more than this (and we will boldface it):
Speaking of being in denial, some conservatives argue that the Pay to Pander program is no big deal compared to the CBS scandal. The Clinton administration did it, too, they point out. Other liberal journalists have failed to disclose ethically suspicious payments, they steam. Excuses, excuses. I thought we on the Right stood against such expedient moral equivalence.
There are no shades of gray about this, friends: the Bush Education Department subsidized a prominent minority conservative "journalist" with federal taxpayer dollars to sell black parents on the Teddy Kennedy-inspired No Child Left Behind boondoggle — a program that represents the largest single expansion in federal education spending since Jimmy Carter created the Education Department.
This fiscally irresponsible, ethically challenged, and possibly illegal arrangement deserves only one thing from conservatives: unqualified contempt.
And, we might add, it deserves contempt from liberals, centrists and members of the administration who have yet punched another hole in their credibility. Can we believe THEM if they’re PAYING PEOPLE to feverishly pitch their programs?"
On her blog, Malkin notes that this column for Jewish World Review "discusses the hidden impact that the Armstrong Williams/Dept. of Ed. scandal will have on minority conservatives." Part of that section of the column:
As a result of the Williams/Department of Education payoff, the rhetoric against the rest of us will get even nastier. In the name of "minority outreach," the Republican education bureaucrats who cooked up their pathetic scheme with Williams have done more damage to our credibility than all the unhinged liberal cartoonists and race-baiters and grievance-mongers could ever hope to do.
Thanks for nothing.
She also includes some of the hate mail she gets from readers who disagree with her — including some who consider her on the payroll of the Bush administration. But these folks didn’t need Armstrong Williams to suggest that to her; they simply disagree with her so they attack her. (We get the "How can you call yourself a moderate" line about once a month and are attacked as conservative by liberals and a liberal by conservatives. Someone even started a rumor that The Moderate Voice is SHORT).
For Malkin’s candor in not scrapping journalistic principle and not jumping through hypocritical hoops to find ways to excuse Williams, we say:
Thanks for something — for being one of those rare individuals who steadfastly defends a core value….even over ideology.
Related Earlier Post: Is here.
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.