'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.