Pubdate: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 Source: Houston Chronicle (TX) Copyright: 2005 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspaper Contact: http://www.chron.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198 Author: Clarence Page 'PAYOLA PUNDITRY' HAS NO PLACE IN SERIOUS JOURNALISM My conservative pundit friend Armstrong Williams just had the weekend from hell, answering phones and juggling interviews like a multitasking press agent for Paris Hilton. "Have you seen the coverage?" he exclaimed over the phone. "I had no idea I was this important!" Well, sorry, my friend, but it's not just about you. There's also the matter of $240,000 in taxpayers' money. That's how much the U.S. Department of Education paid Williams, 45, to promote the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind education reform policy in his dual roles as public relations CEO and a multimedia news and public affairs pundit. An enterprising USA Today reporter unearthed the deal that the Ketchum public-relations firm signed with Williams' Washington-based public relations firm, Graham and Williams, in late 2003 on behalf of the Education Department. It required Williams to promote the No Child Left Behind law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge /America's Black Forum,/ a syndicated public-affairs television program on which he and I have appeared among other panelists, to "periodically address" the law. The contract also required Williams to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004 and allowed Paige to appear as an interview guest in a Williams-produced TV show. "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in," Williams said. Unfortunately, payola is wrong, even when you're being paid to do something you would have done for free anyway. Williams probably understood this when he conveniently failed to tell his audiences or hardly anyone else at his many jobs and public appearances about his cozy contract. When it became a page-one story, he shifted into full-PR mode. He confessed to bad judgment, apologized to his audiences and promised never -- ever! -- to conflict his interests again. But he refused to return the money his firm was paid. Tribune Media Services, which distributed his column (and mine) nationally, dropped him. No problem, he said. He plans to syndicate himself and keep all of the money this time. That's Armstrong. Always the entrepreneur. Of course, that's where his conflicts began. He's not a journalist, but he plays one on TV. My enterprising friend is something quite different from conventional journalists, pundits or public relations agents. Like Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Al Franken, Michael Moore or Tavis Smiley, he is an amalgam of all three -- with some P.T. Barnum thrown in. He is larger than journalism. He is, in short, a brand. Brands don't need to cover stories. They are the story. As a passionately outspoken former aide to the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, R.-S.C., and adviser to Clarence Thomas when the Supreme Court justice was head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Williams built his brand as a black conservative at a time when a new pundit industry was blossoming. With cable TV, talk radio and other new media blossoming, you no longer had to have a lot to say in order to get air time. You merely had to be available at the flip of a producer's Rolodex to give good sound bites from the left or the right, depending on which slot needed to be filled. As Woody Allen's once said, 80 percent of life is showing up. So is broadcast punditry. Now that the media are holding him up to a conventional journalist's ethical standards, Williams says he vows to change his ways. "I'm not going to advocate for anybody or any of the issues that I talk about on television," he vowed. "Either you're going to be a journalist or out hustling for money. I want to be a journalist." Thanks, Armstrong, but I'll believe that when you give up your public relations business. As for the bozos who started this mess at the Education Department, it only adds injury to insult when our tax dollars help pay for video news releases designed to look like regular news reports when inserted into television newscasts without any indication of their government funding. Such fake-news segments probably violate federal propaganda laws, Congress' Government Accountability Office recently concluded -- after reviewing some segments produced by the Health and Human Services Department under Presidents Clinton and Bush and the Office of National Drug Control Policy under Bush. Education Department spokesmen vowed to cooperate with a looming congressional probe of this charade. Good. Secretary Paige is on his way out. Next to go should be anyone who thinks fake news is a clever way to educate the public. Sweep 'em out. Leave all of those idiots behind. Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist specializing in urban issues. He is based in Washington, D.C. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth