Pundit Payola - by Mike Kinsey - a worthwhile read

Kinsey can be a horse's ass at times, and at others, he makes sense. this is not a bad article, all things considered.



But there's a difference between being paid for the right to publish your work and being paid because someone else has published your work. What Abramoff was buying for clients was partly access to media real estate (op-ed pages) that he couldn't commandeer himself and partly the endorsement of conservative pundits who didn't necessarily disagree with the positions they took but probably would not have bothered except for the cash.

. . . .

Still, Pundit Payola is only a tiny step beyond what has become common practice in Washington. Bandow and Ferrara were both associated with Washington "think tanks." Bandow was a "senior fellow" at the CATO Institute, a close-to-genuine scholarly institution, though with an explicit ideological ax to grind (libertarian). Ferrara remains unapologetically as a "senior policy adviser" at something called the Institute for Policy Innovation, which seems to be a more typical lobbying shop with academic decorations. On the Web, its alleged scholars are listed with links to their op-ed pieces. Nothing about books. Ferrara actually has written several books, although mainly he's written one book (about Social Security privatization) several times.

. . . .

In recent months, we have learned that the Bush administration sees nothing wrong with paying for pro-American articles to be planted in Iraqi newspapers. Some have criticized this practice as an unhelpful lesson in how to run a democracy. But the administration has done the same thing, more or less, here at home, giving a fat grant to multimedia black conservative Armstrong Williams for pushing administration policy on his TV show, in his newspaper column, and so on. And now it seems that a figure somewhat more influential than the president among the nation's legislators—Jack Abramoff—has been doing the same thing.

for the rest of the article, http://www.slate.com/id/2133079/