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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.)
Some wiseacre has dubbed Will, Kristol, Krugman, et al., "buckraking journalists." Well, now that I understand how the game is played, I've decided that I want to be a buckraker, too. So I'm officially declaring 2004 as the year in which I sell out.
I figure my insights should be worth something to somebody out there with extra cash to throw around. Though I ply my trade in the shadows of the titans of punditry, I am younger and hipper than those aging dweebs, and I think I could offer the right people some valuable, edgy advice (and I might be able to write some nice things about them, too--wink, wink).
Consider this idea I came up with for the National Slavery Museum. I think it'd be a big mistake for the museum to try to obscure its connection to the consumer wonderland that'll be a stone's throw away. Instead, why not acknowledge Fredericksburg's shopping mecca by inviting museum visitors to take part in "Legacy of Slavery" scavenger hunts over at the big-box stores?
Participants can compete to find the fleece jacket made with forced labor in Myanmar. Or the toy action figure made by children in Sri Lanka. Or tobacco products manufactured by a company that built its empire on the backs of African-American slaves. What great fun it could be!
I've also got an idea for the city of Fredericksburg and some of its well-heeled, civic-minded residents. Y'all go and bundle up contributions totaling, oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000, and I'll form a crack team of urban planners that will tell you how to fix up and promote the city.
Nah, scratch that idea. Who'd ever cough up any money for that?
In any case, there you have it. I can't wait to sell out. Just drop me a line here at the paper. I'll have my bank-account information at the ready.
RICK MERCIER is a writer and editor with The Free Lance-Star.