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Columnist for hire: For big bucks, I'll write nice about your firm

What special interest wants me to write?

Date published: 1/14/2004

By RICK MERCIER

ILOVE THAT George Will selected as an epigraph to his Sunday Washington Post column the Henny Youngman quote "What good is happiness? It can't buy money."

Will knows about money--especially about how to rake it in. The New York Times recently reported that the superstar columnist accepted $25,000 a pop from media baron Conrad Black to participate in "advisory" meetings at his company, Hollinger International. (Will said he couldn't remember how many of these sessions he attended.)

Awhile after those meetings, Will wrote a column ["Notwithstanding 'cowboy caricature,' America has been very slow to wrath," March 5] blasting critics of the Bush administration's rush to war. He cites Black extensively throughout the piece, praising his benefactor for setting the antiwar fools straight. Trouble is, Will didn't inform readers--or his editors at the Post--of his previous relationship with Black.

Asked by the Times about this omission, Will snapped: "My business is my business. Got it?"

Whoa, yeah--what's not to get? Loosen up that bow tie and breathe, big guy. And please don't go and beat up Post ombudsman Michael Getler, who wrote in the paper's Sunday edition:

"[A]ll journalists and commentators need to be scrupulous in making known any possible conflict of interests, real or likely to be perceived. Sometimes it needs to be done in print, but it certainly must be made known to editors, who can make their own decision before publication and distribution. It shouldn't be so easy to just say 'got it?' when it comes to the conditions for access to the columns of the country's newspapers and magazines."

The Will-Hollinger relationship wasn't the only one exposed last year involving journalists who received large sums of cash from big corporations in return for performing some nebulous advisory role.

Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, got $100,000 from Enron; Lawrence Kudlow, columnist for the conservative National Review Online, pocketed a cool $50,000 from the energy company. Both continued to write or edit articles about the corruption-scarred firm without disclosing their financial relationship with it. (Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman also accepted $50,000 from Enron but pre-emptively revealed the windfall to readers.)

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Date published: 1/14/2004