The Conservative Marketing Machine

By Laurie Spivak, AlterNet. Posted January 11, 2005.

The Armstrong Williams story that surfaced last week is unquestionably a juicy one: the conservative, African-American commentator was paid a sweet $240,000 (in taxpayer dollars), by the Department of Education to promote President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. Ketchum, a public relations firm, served as the intermediary, contracting with Williams to promote the controversial law in op/ed pieces and on his nationally syndicated television show "The Right Side," to urge other black journalists and producers to "periodically address" NCLB, and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for radio and television spots promoting the legislation.

Does Ketchum PR sound familiar? If it does, it's because these are the good folks who brought America Karen Ryan last year. Remember Karen? "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting." She was the PR hack who posed as a reporter back in early 2004 to tout President Bush's Medicare reform plan in fake news spots paid for by taxpayer dollars. In May, 2004, the nonpartisan General Accounting Office investigated the Medicare spots and determined that they were illegal because they violated a ban on publicly funded "covert propaganda." Lest a little thing like legality stop this administration, Karen Ryan surfaced again in October in her latest fake news story touting another of President Bush's programs just in time for the election – you guessed it – No Child Left Behind.

In looking at the Williams scandal, there is certainly no shortage of story angles to choose from. There is the classic hypocrisy angle, on full display in one of Williams' articles dated May 24, 2004, with the headline "The Big Education Sell Out" next to a grinning photo of the journalist. In the article, Williams – incidentally, a former aide to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas – criticizes the National Education Association (NEA) for caring more about "massaging the perception" of the public than about kids because of the union's opposition to No Child Left Behind. Classically satirical stuff from a guy who was paid a cool quarter million to massage public perception on the highly contentious NCLB legislation, while his own web site promotes him as both "independent" and "a principled voice for conservatives."

Of course, pundits and journalists tend to favor the "breach of journalistic ethics" angle. Williams, who regularly appears as a commentator on CNN and CNBC failed to disclose his $240,000 payoff to either news producers or audiences when touting the failing NCLB program as a sign of President Bush's unwavering support of the black community. While a CNN spokesperson said, "we will seriously consider this before booking him again," Tribune Media Services (TMS), the syndication service that distributed Williams columns to newspapers nationwide, went a step further and terminated its contract with Williams last Friday. According to TMS, Williams wrote at least four newspaper columns on NCLB in 2004, but never disclosed that he was on the Department of Education's payroll. How did Williams explain this egregious breach of ethics? "I am a pure entrepreneur and I made a business decision. I didn't think about my dual role as media pundit and entrepreneur." Williams now plans to self-syndicate adding, "I always feel I can sell my product better than anyone else."

Still, as appealing as these angles are, it's hard to ignore the "misuse of public funds" angle. A program called "No Child Left Behind" under-funded to the tune of about $7 billion a year – in effect leaving more than four million children behind – allocates a quarter of a million dollars in program funds (read taxpayer dollars) to pay a pundit to promote the failing program. Congressman George Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education Committee and co-author of NCLB, characterized the contract with Williams as "a very questionable use of taxpayers' money" that is "probably illegal," due to that pesky ban on using public funds for propaganda. What was the official response? The administration blamed the Department of Education, whose spokesman John Gibbons said that the contract followed standard government procedures, but added there were no plans for "similar outreach." So what's the moral of the story? One man's illegal covert propaganda is another man's outreach.

While each of these angles certainly makes for a tasty scandal story, they are all pieces of a much bigger story, one that is decidedly less delicious, and one that the mainstream media has consistently missed. This isn't just a story about a self-serving pundit "entrepreneur," or the erosion of public trust in the media, or hypocrisy, or using covert propaganda to sell controversial Bush programs like Medicare reform and NCLB, or the misuse of taxpayer dollars, or the undermining of the American people's trust in the public sector.

Laurie Spivak is a fellow with the Commonweal Institute.

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