Paid Punditry
Depending on the M$M‘s acceptance of the right-wing equivalency claims, we have to listen to how Armstrong Williams’ secret acceptance of a quarter million dollars of government money to promote “Nickleby” on his syndicated media shows and his columns is the same as two liberal bloggers accepting consulting work with the Howard Dean campaign.
I must have missed the display on Williams’ columns and media appearances of a tag saying he was being paid by the Department of Education, you know, something similar to the blurb at the top of the Daily KOS when he was working for Dean. Of course, Jerome Armstrong didn’t have a blurb, because he didn’t blog while he was working for Dean, he just told everyone he had landed the work.
There is also the problem that the payments to Williams are quite probably criminal and are being investigated by the FCC and Congress, while the Dean payments were totally legal and openly reported in multiple government documents.
By now, anyone who listens to the news, reads news sites, or watches the news, has heard the disclaimers that the story being reported is about a group or company that funds the news. If the M$M understands that this is a requirement, why don’t they understand that this is what Williams did wrong?
