Write For Money? Harrumph

The curious ethics of today's socialist scribblers:

Today, newspapers, TV stations and networks, and radio news producers still get inundated with press releases. I described the phenomenon in my column, "Aspects of the Armstrong Williams Flap," back in January. It's just part of the business, really an essential part. Reporters and editors can't be aware of everything. Something newsworthy eventually comes over the transom, and responsible journalists watch out for it. From the other side, energetic public relations agents work hard to get their clients mentioned in the media. Without PR, we in the public would know much, much less.

An ironic term enters in: "Earned media." Supposedly, that means independently arrived at press attention, i.e., attention that somebody deserves. We have all noticed how much easier it is for people and causes of a certain stripe to get "earned media" than it is for another kind of person or cause. The Center for Science in the Public Interest issues a press release on global warming? Front page! The President announces the most significant shift in American foreign policy in decades in a speech at West Point? Hmm...Seem to have forgotten most of that one.


SO WHEN THE PRESS gets itself up in a dudgeon over the U.S. Army paying Iraqi journalists for favorable coverage of peaceful progress, I can't take it too seriously, and I don't think most of the public takes it too seriously, either. The number of journalists who can stay starchily on one side only of the PR line throughout their careers is very small. In the United States, outside interests do not directly "pay" journalists for good coverage. But that's only because journalists already get paid, many of them quite well.

Translation:

Don't complain about somebody else cranking out propaganda for money when your Lefty newspaper is paying you to do the exact same thing, only on behalf of fat cat publishers of the brie-and-caviar set eager to be fashionably anti-American for those Hollywood premieres and Hamptons dinner parties. The Iraqi journalists are doing their nation and ours a far nobler service by getting the truth out about the rebuilding efforts, something the faux-Woodwards in today's sedition assembly lines can't bring themselves to report in their daily fishwrappers.