Seems to me there are a few things that are troubling about the Maggie Gallagher story.

1) The Bush administration is spending lots of taxpayer dollars on propaganda ($90 million, by some accounts), much of it in grants and contracts to media figures. Were this the Clinton administration making payments to journalists, the right would be in fits. But because it’s in the family, they’re making light of it. Sorry. But I don’t really see anything amusing about ridiculous government grants to friends of the administration to write ad copy endorsing expensive government programs (Jonathan Adler begins to broach the subject a bit.)

2) Given that Gallagher and Williams already supported the very programs they were paid to write and pundit about, these basically amounted to, as Josh Marshall put it, taxpayer grants to reward conservative pundits. Or, free federal money for right-wingers. Yeah. I have a problem with that.

3) The right is correct at least in part when it distinguishes Gallagher from Williams. She was paid to write copy for the government, not for freelance advocacy.

But I do think Gallagher’s situation warrants some criticism. She was regularly interviewed by several media outlets about Bush administration marriage policies, and she endorsed said policies in those interviews. Here’s the question you should ask yourself: Does her endorsement of those policies seem less credible after you’ve learned she received $40,000 in grants from the Bush admininstration to write propaganda about those same policies? If the answer is “yes,” then the information should have been disclosed, each time she did an interview. I think the answer is “yes.”

4) It’s difficult to believe that Gallagher’s the only one who got the kind of grants she did, or that Williams is the only one who got the kind of contracts he did. Surely there are more. Will they come forward now, particularly now that everyone involved in both cases admits they should have disclosed? Or will they wait to get caught?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2005 at 3:43 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.