Another media pundit paid to pander
Rathergate.com
Filed under: General— Kevin Craver @ 3:18 pm
Geez, hasn’t it become obvious to media columnists that taking money to help government promote programs is going to get discovered sooner or later?
Boston Herald columnist Charles D. Chieppo makes conservative columnist number four to be caught this year. Michelle Malkin has the background – Chieppo agreed to a contract worth up to $10,000 from the administration of Gov. Mitt Romney to promote the governor’s environmental policies.
Chieppo will be helping officials write op-ed pieces, and apparently will not be injecting his second job into his column. He also said the Herald and the state ethics commission both approved the matter.
Malkin nails it on the head:
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Disclosure is not the only issue. Perception matters, too. Do we really need another paid partisan hack to confirm what the liberal MSM already unfairly assumes of all conservatives in the media – that we’re all on the payroll of the Republican Party and incapable of independent journalism?
Take off the Bad Idea Jeans and show better judgement, people. Crikey.
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For those of you keeping track at home, other conservative pundits with their hands in the taxpayer money jars include Armstrong Williams, Mike McManus and Maggie Gallagher (all three are Malkin links, seeing as how she has been the loudest voice of oppposition to “pay for pander").
Liberal journalists being paid to shill for the United Nations include Ian Williams and Linda Fasulo.
I tackled the issue in a previous post, but seeing as how people just keep taking the money, I’ll re-post my original argument. Although the State of Massachusetts is fronting the money this time, the underlying theme does not change:
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It’s a simple choice, journalists. If you want to be a columnist, be a columnist. If you want to be in public relations, be in public relations. You can’t have both. If you try to have it both ways, you will lose both.
But the blame does not fall squarely on columnists who should know better. The government should know better. Does President Bush have any idea how absolutely lousy it looks to pay off news columnists? It gives the appearance that money is the only way to make new initiatives and policies look good.
And a note to Washington – that’s not your money you’re spending on PR. That’s my money.
These bad apples also further reinforce mainstream journalism’s already lockstep groupthink. Despite mountains of evidence that the mainstream media has a liberal bias problem, the apparatchiks at CJR, AJR and Romenesko will point and state, “Well, these two columnists prove that no liberal bias exists anywhere.”
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