Armstrong Williams: Dumb and Dumber

Armstrong Williams was dumb. The gray line he alluded to in apologizing for his transgression -- taking money to promote the No Child Left Behind Act and not disclosing it -- isn't gray, it's black and white.

I've been in public relations for 28 years, and I've known since practically the first day that you have to disclose who you're working for. If my degree had been in PR instead of journalism, I would have know the rule since before my first job, since it's in the Public Relations Society of America Code of Ethics, for crying out loud. I imagine Williams knew the rule, too, but put money ahead of ethics.

MSM, eager to attack cable news, blogs and punditry in general, are jumping all over Williams. MSM have a lot of failings, but they're not Jayson Blairs; in fact, they have rules against even accepting a coffee from an interviewee, so this is a story they love.

Many bloggers, like La Shawn Barber, are jumping on Williams, too. It's understandable. As a black conservative who no doubt takes a lot of heat, she doesn't need a high-profile black conservative pundit frying very publicly.

But the media is stupider.

As liberals who can't conceive of someone being conservative, let alone black and conservative, MSM see the opportunity to bust someone for CCWB, commenting conservatively whle black, as so juicy that their smart cells to burn out. Just read the lead of today's front page LATimes coverage of the story:

A bipartisan group of lawmakers called for an investigation Friday into whether the Bush administration misused taxpayer funds by paying a prominent media pundit $240,000 to promote the president's controversial new education policy.

Policy? The LATimes seems to forget that No Child Left Behind is a law not a policy, and that it was passed into law by the United States Congress under the leadership of, among others, Teddy Kennedy, who today had this to say:

"We believe that the act of bribing journalists to bias their news in favor of government policies undermines the integrity of our democracy," said Democratic Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada, Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts in a letter to the president. They wrote that such actions "were common in the Soviet Union, but until now, thought to be long extinguished in our country."

There they go with that "policy" word again, forgetting the votes they cast in the US Congress, not the Politboro. The difference between "policy" and "law" makes all the difference in the world, because government has legitimately used PR to support and educate about policy since it turned on the PR machine to sell War Bonds during World War II.

The videos Williams produced -- and should have told the world about whenever he was promoting No Child Left Behind in his columns and on TV -- are called video news releases or VNRs. If you're unfortunate enough to watch local news broadcasts, you probably see several VNRs a day. They are sent by PR firms to stations, and stations are smart enough to know they receive them from people who represent an interest -- from toothpaste manufacturers to government agencies.

Video news releases are clearly labeled, but the VNR itself may or may not identify the sponsor because the media would cut those references anyway. They want to appear objective, and they want you to think it's their film, not PR film -- so they're sort of lying; sort of being unethical.

Williams' stupidity will probably blow over in the media because after he loses his jobs they won't be able to do much more with the story. But his stupidity has hurt the cause and credibility of black conservatism -- and that's the more important angle of this story.