Gladwell was trained up in the same corporate-funded network of training and “education” institutes and outfits responsible for churning out the likes of Michelle Malkin, convicted criminal James O’Keefe, Dinesh D’Souza and countless other GOP corporate activists. The difference: Unlike Gladwell, they rarely hid their ideological willingness to take cash in exchange for promoting the corporate right’s agenda.

While a student at the University of Toronto, Gladwell’s admiration for Ronald Reagan led him into conservative activist circles. In 1982, while still an undergrad, he completed a 12-week training course at the National Journalism Center, a corporate-funded program created to counter the media’s alleged “anti-business bias” by molding college kids into corporate-friendly journalist-operatives and helping them infiltrate top-tier news media organizations. To quote Philip Morris, a major supporter of the National Journalism Center, its mission was to "train budding journalists in free market political and economic principles." Over the years the National Journalism Center has produced hundreds of pro-business news media moles, including top-tier conservative talent like Ann Coulter and former Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member John Fund.

After graduating from University of Toronto in 1984, Gladwell spent a few years bouncing around the far-right fringe of the corporate media spectrum. He wrote for the American Spectator—notorious in the 1990s as the primary media organ promoting anti-Clinton conspiracy theories—as well as the Moonie-owned Insight on the News. From 1985-6, Gladwell served as assistant editor at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which was created to bridge the gap between neoconservatives and Christian fundamentalists and help the two hostile factions to come together to counter a common enemy: activists fighting for economic justice. Rick Santorum was a fellow at EPPC until June 2011, when he left to concentrate on his attempt to secure the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

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From the get-go, Gladwell’s reporting stands out for its unabashedly pro-business, anti-regulation bias. Nowhere was this bias more evident than in Gladwell’s barely disguised promotion of the tobacco industry’s agenda. Gladwell’s reporting on tobacco issues in the early '90s came just as Big Tobacco was was gearing up for its war against looming class-action lawsuits, as well as the mounting pressure for stricter regulation of the industry. As the Post's business and science reporter, Gladwell carried the tobacco lobby’s water—and messages—while raising doubts about the industry’s critics.

One of the more obvious and disgusting examples: In 1990, Gladwell published a rank scare-article arguing that any moves to cut Americans’ smoking habits could "put a serious strain on the nation's Social Security and Medicare programs"--meaning that high levels of smoking was helping keep America's social safety from going bankrupt, since so many were dying before they could collect.

Full article (long: ~6,800 words): http://www.shameproject.com/report/malcolm-gladwell-unmasked-life-work-of-americas-most-successful-propagandist