Now we KNOW Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is a fast-study in Washington power techniques and is aiming for The Big Time (White House) with the news that his administration has hired a local newspaper columnist to shill his policies:
Governor Mitt Romney’s administration has awarded a $10,000 contract to a Boston Herald op-ed columnist to promote the governor’s environmental policies.The columnist, Charles D. Chieppo, started working yesterday with the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs.
His job calls for writing op-ed pieces and internal documents ”to support the efforts of senior management to promote education, awareness, and acceptance of major policy initiatives” on the environment.
Chieppo will work two days a week until at least June 30. He also plans to continue writing op-ed columns for the Herald, where he is paid for each article.
Chieppo, who signed his pact on April 2, declined to comment yesterday. In January, he left a six-figure job in the Executive Office of Administration and Finance to start a private consulting business and to write the weekly Herald column.
Joe O’Keefe, Romney’s assistant environmental secretary for public affairs, said in an interview yesterday that Chieppo has ”fully vetted” the consultancy with the state Ethics Commission and that ”he can’t have any contact with Herald reporters or columnists or write anything that would be published in the Herald on our behalf.”
Chieppo was awarded the contract over another bidder when his Herald columns were highly supportive of Romney’s policies. His March 21 column, which appeared three days after Chieppo submitted his bid for the state contract, praised the Romney mass-transit plan that was largely authored by Douglas Foy, the secretary of Commonwealth development and the person who oversees the Environmental Affairs office that now employs Chieppo.
Can you notice — readers on the right and left — how a precedent once established becomes the norm?
This was a big scandal when it came out that the Bush administration was giving a columnist a nice, unpublicized side income to talk about how terrific the administration’s education policies were. Then came the news that here in California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration was putting out one-sided state p.r. pieces misleadingly looking like news stories. Now we get this in Massachusetts.
The bottom line is that citizens throughout the country are letting the lines become blurred between news and propaganda. And we know that there are some on the left and right who will flippantly say: “News is propaganda!” Then, there are GRADATIONS of propaganda. Years ago Americans would look down their noses at this kind of thing when Communist countries did it and go “tsk, tsk — see how they try to brainwash their people?”
When TMV was in journalism school going for his Masters at Northwestern Medill’s School of Journalism, and when he was a freelance, and when he worked at two daily newspapers, accepting any kind of perk or payment from someone about whom you would be writing about was considered being “co-opted” by them…which was a polite way of saying something else.
Mitt knows how to play the game. He’s ready for the bigtime…
UPDATE: The Boston-Herald just FIRED someone. GUESS WHO?
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.