Wednesday, January 26, 2005

We Only Said it Happened Once Because We Didn't Think You'd Find the Other Cases

More of your tax dollars going to journalists to promote government policies. Syndicated columnist Maggie Gallager repeatedly rode to the Bush administration's defense in 2002 over a $300 million plan to encourage marriage as a way of strengthening families.

But Gallagher never told her readers she'd taken $21,500 from a Department of Health and Human Services contract to promote the plan. Her work ran from January through October in 2002. She also took another $20,000 grant from the Justice Department to write a report called Can Government Strengthen Marriage? The report was for a private group called the National Fatherhood Initiative.

The amount of money is not nearly as much as the $240,000 commentator Armstrong Williams took in an undisclosed government contract to promote the "No Child Left Behind" law. But after that scandal broke, the White House promised on January 11 that the Williams case was an isolated incident. (WashPost)

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