Another Pundit on the Payroll

The issue of pundit payola, it seems, is not limited to inside the Beltway.

Eric Wesson, a columnist for the Call, an African American newspaper in Kansas City, offered plenty of praise last year for the successful House bid of Democrat Emanuel Cleaver. "Rev. Cleaver," he wrote, "has the experience to get things done and getting people to work together, he unites people. . . . Rev. Cleaver is a master at getting others to see his vision and surrounding himself with role players to make the vision become a reality. . . . I admire his honesty."

Cleaver's campaign last summer paid $1,500 to a firm called One Goal Consultants. And the sole owner of One Goal Consultants, according to state records, is Wesson.

"I wrote out some phone scripts for his phone banks," Wesson says. "I think I did about 50 of them and some other miscellaneous things. It had nothing to do with the job I do for the Call. The Call has always written articles favorable to African American candidates. We're an advocacy newspaper."

Readers of the Call, however, were unaware that Wesson was getting cash from the campaign. "Should I have disclosed it in my articles? I don't know," says Wesson. "Would it have made any difference?"

Wesson, who wrote such stories as "Cleaver Shifts Campaign Into High Gear," defended the former Kansas City mayor against allegations that a state agency bent its guidelines in lending Cleaver $80,000 to help buy a car wash.

What does the newspaper think about this? "We don't have any comments," said Managing Editor Donna Stewart. She also declined to comment to Pitch Weekly, a local paper that ran an item last year on Wesson's moonlighting.

But that was only part of Wesson's work. Luther Washington, who managed Cleaver's campaign, said Wesson's firm was given a new contract after the congressman's election. "We used him for brainstorming for ideas for national news stories specifically targeted to the black press," Washington said. Meanwhile, Wesson, who will write the releases under the rubric "Congressman's Corner," has continued to cover Cleaver.

"It wasn't that we were trying to buy support," Washington says. Amber Moon, a spokeswoman for Cleaver, says the Call is a weekly that "goes to his base. I'm not sure he had a need to court favorable journalism with that paper."

Attention Young Liberals

College campuses are widely viewed as liberal bastions, with towns such as Berkeley, Cambridge and Madison used as shorthand for left-wing communities of faculty and students.

So why is a Washington think tank funneling money to universities to encourage liberal journalism? Isn't that a bit like pumping sand into the Mojave Desert?

"We're not winning the battle of ideas on campus," says David Halperin, who is running the project for the Center for American Progress. Conservatives "have this insurgency mentality, even though they run the world."

"We're being outhustled," says Halperin's colleague, Ben Hubbard. "We want to cultivate the media stars, much like the right has done with Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza."

Toward that end, the center will give $750,000 to nine liberal campus publications at such places as Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Wisconsin, and help launch four at the universities of Michigan, Chicago, Kentucky and Ohio State. This is dwarfed by the more than $30 million a year that they estimate conservative campus organizations receive from such groups as the Young America's Foundation and Leadership Institute.

Leah Caldwell, editor of Issue at the University of Texas, says she and two friends broke away from the school's daily paper because they felt that racial issues were being "sanitized" and more national coverage was needed. She says the center's $3,000 grant will put the magazine on a regular monthly schedule rather than struggling to raise money for each edition.

The project, being launched this week, includes a Web site, CampusProgress.org, that will act as a clearinghouse for student journalism, along with contributions and interviews from the likes of Larry David, Al Franken and Margaret Cho. And the site will offer policy guidance. "We'll call them crib sheets, but they're talking points," says Halperin, a former Clinton White House speechwriter.

Also underway is a speakers' bureau (such as Al Sharpton and Armstrong Williams discussing the black vote this week at Howard University) and a training program, putting young journalists in touch with staffers for the Nation, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly and American Prospect.

The venture plans full-page newspaper ads that are anything but subtle. Featuring pictures and quotes from Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and James Dobson, the ads say: "Conservatives in Washington are attacking our personal freedoms. Young Americans fight and die in a war built on their deceptions. . . . Don't Just Sit Around. Connect. Engage. Speak Up."

Toeing the Line?

A Dallas Morning News editorial recently urged the Federal Communications Commission to require cable systems to carry local stations on multiple channels as digital technology becomes available.

This stance (which the FCC later rejected) happens to be the same one that the paper's parent firm, Belo Corp., has been lobbying for in Washington -- although Belo's role, as the owner of 19 television stations, wasn't mentioned.

"It was an error on our part for which I am responsible," says Editorial Page Editor Keven Ann Willey. While the paper "routinely" mentions Belo's interests, she says, her busy schedule and a staff shortage led to "a comedy of errors. I regret it."

But Belo executives asked for a copy of the editorial, and lo and behold, it ran the next day in another of the company's papers, the Providence Journal, although the fact that the proposal would hurt Belo was mentioned. Journal Editorial Page Editor Robert Whitcomb -- who recently complained about op-ed pieces in which "the 'content' itself is often written by PR spinmeisters" -- says he cannot comment on "internal matters."

Early Exit

Howard Stern is being cut off in Washington.

Sometimes in mid-sentence.

WJFK-FM, which will lose Stern to Sirius Satellite Radio next January, has started dumping out of the show at 10 a.m., 30 to 45 minutes before it ends. The reason, says Infinity Broadcasting Corp. Senior Vice President Michael Hughes, is to "squeeze a bunch of great shows into a few hours," one of which might replace Stern in morning drive. He's now followed by the Junkies, four sports-minded guys who came over from another Infinity station, WHFS, when it switched to Spanish.

Stern groused about the early hook on the air last week and gave out Hughes's name and phone number. "It hasn't been pleasant," Hughes says.

Media Morsels

Miami Herald reporter Wanda DeMarzo had exposed how the Broward County sheriff's department allegedly falsified crime statistics. In retaliation, an aide to Sheriff Ken Jenne testified, the sheriff told him to leak the fact that DeMarzo had been arrested three times since 2000 on drunk-driving charges, and convicted once. The testimony came in a case against two of Jenne's deputies. The aide said he refused to spread the derogatory information. . . . The Lexington, Ky., Herald-Leader, using online databases, helped track down an escaped murderer who had been on the loose since 1990. The police had been making little progress in the case. . . . With its ratings down by about half in the past four years, CNBC has named a new president, Mark Hoffman, who was running an NBC station in Connecticut. Pamela Thomas-Graham, who dropped the network's prime-time newscast and "Capital Report" while adding Conan O'Brien reruns and the since-canceled John McEnroe show, was bumped up to chairman.

In case you were playing hooky this weekend, here's my report on Eason Jordan's resignation at CNN and a broader piece on the role of bloggers in several recent media dustups. Lots of bloggers weighing in on the Eason saga, but I want to quote this post from Rony Abovitz, the technology executive who originally posted what Jordan had said about the military and journalists at a closed-door Davos conference:

"Is there a revolution underway? There is no doubt. It is fueled by the internet, blogs, open source software, and free thinking technology. It is a revolution whose face appears in many ways. The music industry has been rocked by it, the film industry soon will be, and the media has just felt a significant tremor. This will touch politics, governance, practically every aspect of our lives. There will soon be over 2 billion people on the planet with mobile phones capable of interacting on the web, sending and receiving text, images, video, and voice -- anywhere, anytime, almost instantly. This is just the beginning.

"I am unnerved by what has happened, at the ferocity of the blog swarm, of Eason's fumbled retreats, evasive maneuvers, and an inexplicable refusal to have his own words played back to the world on a videotape (which does exist). The head of the largest news organization in the world, afraid of himself. There is a Shakespearean sense of tragedy and drama in this story. Eason, prince of CNN, committs a last act of valor and attempts to restore grace to himself and his overlords. His actions are classic Bushido, the way of the Samurai warrior, sacrificing himself to protect his Masters from harm. Give him at least this."

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman offers this take on Dean's elevation this weekend:

"The rebels have stormed the citadel, and now they're taking over.

"Howard Dean's ascension to the Democratic chairmanship -- an event virtually unimaginable last year, when he was racking up 17 losses in 18 presidential primaries -- signifies a historic power shift within the party, from the Washington establishment to the foot soldiers who are fed up with defeat. . . .

"Over the last 150 years, by tradition, the Democratic chairman had been an insider with powerful pals -- a crony of the president, or protege of a key senator, or a front man for fat-cat donors. And the choice of that leader, by the voting members of the Democratic National Committee, had generally been 'a rigged deal,' as party strategist James Carville put it.

"Dean breaks the mold. Never before has the leader of a grassroots citizen army captured this job. The same guy who once inveighed against 'the Washington politics-as-usual club,' and who once referred to members of Congress as 'cockroaches,' has been given a mandate to shake things up -- courtesy of the party's 447 voting members, who hail from all 50 states and who no longer intend to follow the old guard."

American Prospect's Michael Tomasky says the Dems don't stand for much these days--and he's worried:

"It's not an exaggeration to say that liberalism in this country is on the precipice of being in deep, deep trouble. One more election like the last two, and movement conservatism will be in charge of Congress for decades to come. Take a look at the senators up for reelection in 2006: There could be, realistically, close to 60 Republican senators by January 2007. Once they hit 60, of course, they have the votes to defeat cloture and get anything through the Senate they wish. If they increase their margin in the Senate, odds are that they'll do so in the House as well, by another handful of seats; and given the way districts are drawn these days, that majority will likely exist for many years.

"The judicial branch, of course, is close to being sewn up for conservatives already. And if Antonin Scalia becomes chief justice, and if President George W. Bush appoints two more associate justices -- replacing the moderate John Paul Stevens and the sometimes-moderate Sandra Day O'Connor with movement conservatives (and he's certainly given no indication that he'd nominate anything but movement conservatives) -- the judiciary will be conservative for at least 20 more years. . . .

"When conservatives were at the bottom of the well, they didn't spend a lot of time engaged in namby-pamby navel-gazing. They went out and said what they believed, repeatedly, loudly, unapologetically. And they won. And, therefore, that's what our side needs to do now.

"There's some justification for this point of view; certainly, one of the Democratic Party's biggest problems these days is that people don't know what they stand for, and just standing for something -- anything! -- is better than always appearing to be backtracking, soft-pedaling, trying to prove they're just as tough or patriotic as Republicans. It's a pathetic thing to watch. And here's one point on which I want to be very clear: Self-examination does not mean inevitably moving to the middle. Adopting a centrist pose can be every bit as knee-jerk and shallow as insisting that nothing's changed since 1974, and it can be even more debilitating politically than going (or staying) left."

Rich Lowry is officially in Condi's corner:

"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's just-concluded trip to Europe signals that the United States is back in the diplomacy business in earnest again. Part of the reason is that after four years of Colin Powell, the United States now has a secretary of State in full.

"A contradiction President Bush's critics have never confronted is that they spent the past four years lamenting the Bush administration's poor diplomacy at the same time they celebrated its top diplomat. They only turned on Powell when he took the administration's case against Saddam Hussein to the world with his February 2003 speech to the United Nations -- never mind this is the sort of thing written in a secretary of State's job description (it wasn't Powell's fault that the prewar intelligence was so grievously flawed).

"Rice was helped in Europe by having a wind at her back from Bush's reelection and the Jan. 30 vote in Iraq, and there will surely be difficult days ahead for her (can you say Pyongyang?). But her tenure, following directly on the heel's Powell's, will probably offer a tale of two secretaries of State.

"Rice gets things Powell never did. For instance, that leaking to Bob Woodward and other Washington Post reporters is not the secretary of State's chief responsibility. Powell was so obviously the primary source for so many journalistic accounts of intra-administration fights that he often deserved a co-byline."

Hey, what's wrong with a little leaking? The White House leaks too, y'know (though far less than the Clinton White House).

Kos does some fact-checking on now-resigned White House reporter Jeff Gannon:

"On CNN, 'Gannon' claimed that Talon News had 700,000 users. But according to Alexa, it's ranked 640,000 on the web. That is, there are roughly 640,000 sites on the web with more traffic than Talon News.

"For comparison, Daily Kos, with 365,000 average daily visits, ranks 3,365. Instapundit comes in at 6,918, with about 171,000 average daily visits.

"Talon News isn't 700,000 users strong, obviously.

"And btw, isn't 'talon news' the cheesiest name ever?"

Eugene Volokh, meanwhile, fact-checks Slate:

"Slate's Bushism of the Day is: 'Listen, the other day I was asked about the National Intelligence Estimate, which is a National Intelligence Estimate.' -- Washington, D.C., Sep. 23, 2004

"Ha ha ha. That President of ours, he's such a doofus. Why would he say 'about the National Intelligence Estimate, which is a National Intelligence Estimate'? Hard to believe, but there it is. Or, wait a minute, maybe because it's hard to believe, we should double-check before believing it, no? That is, unless we're so wedded to the 'Bush Talks Funny' meme that we've relaxed our normal skepticism and journalistic caution.

"Fortunately, reader Jacob Kaufman's skepticism and caution hadn't relaxed, so he found the White House transcript (remember, Slate's Bushism of the Day column never includes pointers to the transcripts). That site happens to have the audio. And the audio, at a little after 30:54, shows that Bush said:

" 'Listen, the other day I was asked about the NIE, which is a National Intelligence Estimate.'

"Yup, that's right. President Bush used the abbreviation, and then explained what the abbreviation meant. The official transcript erroneously spelled out the abbreviation, though it rendered it in all caps, which -- together with the improbability of the President's just saying 'the National Intelligence Estimate, which is the National Intelligence Estimate' -- might have led a cautious journalist to check into it."

Slate, to its credit, has run a correction.