I must admit to being saddened and a bit angered to read that Doug Bandow, a former writer for the CATO Institute, a leading U.S. libertarian think tank, has left after it was revealed that he was paid by a lobbyist to write articles specifically favouring said lobbyist’s clients. I used to like some of the stuff Bandow wrote as he came across as a relatively sane voice on domestic and foreign policy issues. It turns out that at least on certain topics, he was a shill. Ouch.
Of course, most of us have to work to earn a crust, and there is nothing specifically wrong in my view in a writer being paid by a company or organisation to advance a point of view so long as the writer is up-front about that. If a person writing skeptical articles about the so-called Greenhouse Effect is backed by Exxon or Shell, then one can obviously take that into account, even if the quality of the argument is impeccable. The same might go, say, for a writer getting backing from Greenpeace who writes all manner of doomonger articles, and so forth.
A lot of people who once enjoyed Bandow’s articles will be feeling slightly peeved.
First Armstrong Williams, the black conservative, gets exposed for taking more than $200,000 from the Feds to write in praise of GW Bush’s uberstatist No Child Left Behind program.
Then a whole bunch of Army types are caught using a PR firm to plant ‘positive’ articles about the Iraqi occupation in its press, and paying retainers to local hacks to churn out more of the same.
And now this. Bandow was quite a big name, too.
How much American taxpayers’ and shareholders’ money is being used to keep the Fourth Estate ‘on message’ with the Republican administration or business interests? Is this how power fights back in an age when the internet lets opinionators communicate directly with the perplexed, without the helpful intermediation of corporate-media gatekeepers?
You should see Paul Staine’s Thunderer piece in today’s Times. It is a real hatchet job on certain think tanks and will cause ructions.
“If a person writing skeptical articles about the so-called Greenhouse Effect is backed by Exxon or Shell, then one can obviously take that into account, even if the quality of the argument is impeccable”
Actually, that’s not true. Who you are, who pays you, and how many heinous crimes you have commited is completely irrelevant to the value of your argument – assuming it’s a real argument.
The problem is, few of these sorts of people produce actual arguments. They rather grab a few statistics (selectively) and waffle about some possible explanation for them. That’s not argument, in the strict philosophical sense. It’s more the kind of sophistry that politicians deal in at PMQs.
It is, however, the most common form of discourse in the modern age. When it comes to opinions, it’s all about judging the opinion maker in an attempt to divine the possible worth of the logic behind their opinions – they rarely bother to explain it to us clearly.
We care about these kinds of scandals precisely because the people involved never _actually_ argued convincingly enough for the argument to stand on its own two feet – it had to have the backing of the august and might cato institute or whatever for anyone to deem it worthy of serious reading.
I’m reminded of other recent MSM scandals – faked memos, Mirror photos and imaginative NYT journos.
Kinda sad, really. Conservatives have to pay for hack journalism; liberals and Greens get theirs all for free.
“…liberals and Greens get theirs all for free.” Are you sure?
Alisa:
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen certain statist groups — usually “consumer” groups or “environmental” pressure groups — hold a press conference or release a report, and have the news organizations report it as real news. Here in New York, the local TV news organizations usually report such stories as, “A consumer group says XYZ”, and about all else we get in the report is a couple of sound bites from the accompanying press conference. Sometimes it’s even worse — the local TV news starts off the report by saying “XYZ” as its own sentence, as though the assertion is actually a fact.
By the same token, I listen to the BBC World Service, and I don’t know how many times I’ve heard “studies” by the Worldwide Fund for Nature, or Greenpeace, or Oxfan, reported in the top-of-the-hour news bulletins with the assertions being treated as factual, and with the most extreme predictions being highlighted — if an environmental study claims the world’s weather could rise anywhere from 0.1 to 10 Celsius degrees in the next centry, the BBCWS will report it as “a report released today says the world’s temperature could rise by 10 degrees Celsius over the next century”, completely omitting the bottom end of the range.
How do you think the Lancet’s Iraq ‘study’ got so much prominence?
Ted missed two important dangerous constructs – the International Red Cross, something to watch very closely; and Amnesty International – another tranzi worm to keep an alert eye on.
I should have made clearer that my list was in no way comprehensive. Indeed, I actually thought about including Amnesty International in my original post, but I thought the point was already clear; namely that certain types of pressure groups get free publicity from the willing mass media.
It’s “Cato Institute”. Leave the all-caps typo to the foaming lefties so we can identify them easier.
Eric, whatever.