Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Bush administration paying independent
commentators
Fri Jan 28, 2005 02:38
64.140.158.54
Bush administration paying independent commentators
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=605168
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
27 January 2005
The controversy over the Bush administration paying money to supposedly independent commentators reignited yesterday when it was revealed that another syndicated columnist had been paid to promote the president's policies.
Maggie Gallagher, a regular media commentator on so-called family values, admitted she had received an undisclosed payment of $21,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services to promote Mr Bush's $300m initiative to encourage marriage. She received a further $20,000 to write a report about the government initiative for a private organisation.
Writing in 2002, for instance, for the right-wing National Review Online, she said: "The Bush marriage initiative would emphasise the importance of marriage to poor couples and educate teens on the value of delaying child-bearing until marriage. [This could] carry big payoffs down the road for tax-payers and children."
Last year, in appearances on television, in columns and with newspapers she defended Mr Bush's proposal for a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Her website currently carries an article which claims evidence from Sweden suggests gay and lesbian married couples are more likely to divorce than heterosexual couples.
Contacted yesterday by The Independent, Ms Gallagher declined to comment, saying she had addressed the issue in a column posted on her website. In that column she wrote: "My first instinct is to say no... I had no special obligation to disclose this information. I'm a marriage expert. I get paid to write, edit, research, and educate on marriage. If a scholar or expert gets paid to do some work for the government, should he or she disclose that if he writes a paper, essay, or op-ed on the same or similar subject? If this is the ethical standard, it is an entirely new standard."
She added: "The real truth is that it never occurred to me. On reflection, I think... I should have disclosed a government contract... I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers."
The news about Ms Gallagher, president of the conservative Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, follows the earlier revelation that right-wing commentator Armstrong Williams was paid $241,000 to promote the government's education policy. Though he apologised, Mr Williams has lost a number of his columns as a result of the controversy.
Questioned about the practice of the White House making undisclosed payments to pundits, Mr Bush yesterday sought to put the blame on Mr Williams, saying he had "made a mistake". He then conceded that the Department of Education had also acted wrongly, adding: "All our Cabinet secretaries must realise that we are not paying commentators to promote our agenda. Our agenda must stand on its own two feet."
Steve Rendall, an analyst with the independent media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), said Mr Bush was trying to place blame on the commentators rather than accepting that it was the White House that paid them to support its policies.
"The real offence here is that readers or radio listeners are being defrauded in a sense lied to," he said. "They believe they are reading the words or hearing the opinion of an independent pundit but they are being propagandised to by a covert government agent."
He added: "Mr Bush says his policies can stand on their own but they apparently can not."
---------------------------------------
... Not the Republicans gloating over payoffs from their electoral chicanery. America's civil rights, media, education, health, energy, finance, transportation and ...
MORE:>>
============================
Real History Archives Media Collection: The CIA and the Media
... as a result of pressure from the media), some journalists ... investigation into the
matter, CIA officials say ... organizations and individuals in American journalism. ...
MORE:>>
Here's just a snippet from Carl Bernstein's famous 1977 article entitled "The CIA & The Media" from Rolling Stone, 10/20/77. Anyone with access to a library should try to find this - it's a truly breakthrough piece - 16 pages long in the reprint! begin snippet:
In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America's leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services -- from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading news organizations.
The history of the CIA's involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:
The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA. Although the agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 (primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalists are still posted abroad.
Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950's and 1960's with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.
Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Services. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
[...]
Appropriately, the CIA uses the term 'reporting' to describe much of what cooperating journalists did for the Agency. "We would ask them, 'Will you do us a favor?'" said a senior CIA official. "'We understand you're going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved all the streets? Where did you see planes? Were there any signs of military presence? How many Soviets did you see? If you happen to meet a Soviet, get his name and spell it right....Can you set up a meeting for us? Or arrange a message?'" Many CIA officials regarded these helpful journalists as operatives: the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors -- usually without pay -- in the national interest.
[...]
Two of the Agency's most valuable relationships in the 1960's, according to CIA officials, were with reporters who covered Latin America -- Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star and Hal Hendrix of Miami News, a Pulitzer Prize winner who became a high official of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Hendrix was extremely helpful to the Agency in providing information about individuals in Miami's Cuban exile community.
[....]
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=605168
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
27 January 2005
The controversy over the Bush administration paying money to supposedly independent commentators reignited yesterday when it was revealed that another syndicated columnist had been paid to promote the president's policies.
Maggie Gallagher, a regular media commentator on so-called family values, admitted she had received an undisclosed payment of $21,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services to promote Mr Bush's $300m initiative to encourage marriage. She received a further $20,000 to write a report about the government initiative for a private organisation.
Writing in 2002, for instance, for the right-wing National Review Online, she said: "The Bush marriage initiative would emphasise the importance of marriage to poor couples and educate teens on the value of delaying child-bearing until marriage. [This could] carry big payoffs down the road for tax-payers and children."
Last year, in appearances on television, in columns and with newspapers she defended Mr Bush's proposal for a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Her website currently carries an article which claims evidence from Sweden suggests gay and lesbian married couples are more likely to divorce than heterosexual couples.
Contacted yesterday by The Independent, Ms Gallagher declined to comment, saying she had addressed the issue in a column posted on her website. In that column she wrote: "My first instinct is to say no... I had no special obligation to disclose this information. I'm a marriage expert. I get paid to write, edit, research, and educate on marriage. If a scholar or expert gets paid to do some work for the government, should he or she disclose that if he writes a paper, essay, or op-ed on the same or similar subject? If this is the ethical standard, it is an entirely new standard."
She added: "The real truth is that it never occurred to me. On reflection, I think... I should have disclosed a government contract... I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers."
The news about Ms Gallagher, president of the conservative Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, follows the earlier revelation that right-wing commentator Armstrong Williams was paid $241,000 to promote the government's education policy. Though he apologised, Mr Williams has lost a number of his columns as a result of the controversy.
Questioned about the practice of the White House making undisclosed payments to pundits, Mr Bush yesterday sought to put the blame on Mr Williams, saying he had "made a mistake". He then conceded that the Department of Education had also acted wrongly, adding: "All our Cabinet secretaries must realise that we are not paying commentators to promote our agenda. Our agenda must stand on its own two feet."
Steve Rendall, an analyst with the independent media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), said Mr Bush was trying to place blame on the commentators rather than accepting that it was the White House that paid them to support its policies.
"The real offence here is that readers or radio listeners are being defrauded in a sense lied to," he said. "They believe they are reading the words or hearing the opinion of an independent pundit but they are being propagandised to by a covert government agent."
He added: "Mr Bush says his policies can stand on their own but they apparently can not."
---------------------------------------
... Not the Republicans gloating over payoffs from their electoral chicanery. America's civil rights, media, education, health, energy, finance, transportation and ...
MORE:>>
============================
Real History Archives Media Collection: The CIA and the Media
... as a result of pressure from the media), some journalists ... investigation into the
matter, CIA officials say ... organizations and individuals in American journalism. ...
MORE:>>
Here's just a snippet from Carl Bernstein's famous 1977 article entitled "The CIA & The Media" from Rolling Stone, 10/20/77. Anyone with access to a library should try to find this - it's a truly breakthrough piece - 16 pages long in the reprint! begin snippet:
In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America's leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA.
Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists' relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services -- from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America's leading news organizations.
The history of the CIA's involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:
The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence-gathering employed by the CIA. Although the agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 (primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalists are still posted abroad.
Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950's and 1960's with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.
Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Services. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune.
By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.
[...]
Appropriately, the CIA uses the term 'reporting' to describe much of what cooperating journalists did for the Agency. "We would ask them, 'Will you do us a favor?'" said a senior CIA official. "'We understand you're going to be in Yugoslavia. Have they paved all the streets? Where did you see planes? Were there any signs of military presence? How many Soviets did you see? If you happen to meet a Soviet, get his name and spell it right....Can you set up a meeting for us? Or arrange a message?'" Many CIA officials regarded these helpful journalists as operatives: the journalists tended to see themselves as trusted friends of the Agency who performed occasional favors -- usually without pay -- in the national interest.
[...]
Two of the Agency's most valuable relationships in the 1960's, according to CIA officials, were with reporters who covered Latin America -- Jerry O'Leary of the Washington Star and Hal Hendrix of Miami News, a Pulitzer Prize winner who became a high official of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Hendrix was extremely helpful to the Agency in providing information about individuals in Miami's Cuban exile community.
[....]
- Gonzales: The Fight Is On nomination for US Attorney General —The Nation, Fri Jan 28 03:15
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