PJNet

The other day ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin did a count of 380 think tank interviews at National Public Radio in 2005. That’s more than one a day.

Today we learn in a Business Week article that Jack Abramoff was paying off think tank members to write op-ed pieces favorable to his lobbying efforts. The article says some of those payments went to Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation. The article says

Ferrara,…says he, too, took money from Abramoff to write op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist’s clients. “I do that all the time,” Ferrara says. “I’ve done that in the past, and I’ll do it in the future.”

What does Ferrara’s boss at the Institute for Policy Innovation say:

“If somebody pinned me down and said, ‘Do you think this is wrong or unethical?’ I’d say no,” says Tom Giovanetti, president of the Institute for Policy Innovation. Giovanetti says critics are applying a “naive purity standard” to the op-ed business. “I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.”

I did a search to see, for example, if any Institute for Policy Innovation think tankers were on NPR. Sure enough Merrill Matthews, who NPR refers to as a visiting scholar at IPI, provides commentary. Paid or unpaid? That is a question NPR and all other news media have to find out.

I also noticed that Newt Gingrich and Peter Ferrara co-authored a commentary at the Wall Street Journal. Paid or unpaid? The Wall Street Journal must tell us, and must seek answers, as must all news media outlets. Are their commentators paid-off hacks or legitimate researchers and scholars, which we would expect at think tanks.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 3:51 pm 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.