Well, this certainly tells us something about how the GOP plans to deal with the "liberal media." Just throw money at it and buy it off. Come to find out, it's not only Armstrong Williams who got paid off to shill for the administration. Now we have a second so-called "journalist" who was on the Bush payroll to hype his ideas in return for a nice paycheck. So much for conservative griping about liberal media tactics. Quite obviously, we have an administration that spends
taxpayer money like it was a partisan campaign contribution. And to think that Republicans have spent years griping about big-money Democrats who make political contributions to the party of their choice. Who cares about big-money Democrats when you can just waltz into the White House and seize
TAXPAYER dollars for your own party agenda?
Quote:
In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.
"The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples" and "educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage," she wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could "carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children."
But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.
"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?" Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.
Later in the day, Gallagher filed a column in which she said that "I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers."
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