Lax standards open door to misuse of media.

THE defrocking of Armstrong Williams, conservative pundit and publicist for the religious right, as a paid shill for the Bush administration was fast though only modestly furious.

There has been ample documentation of the White House's willingness to shade, hide or obstruct the truth in pursuit of its agenda. Fuzziness of logic and dubiousness of fact are bowled over by repetition. Volume, by all its definitions, trumps truth.

The disclosure that Williams, the public relations man-turned conservative columnist, took $240,000 from the Department of Education to tout the No Child Left Behind Act is only the latest such effort to come to light.

The Government Accountability Office has cited two federal agencies in the last year for breaking the law by tapping their budgets to create fabricated news stories in the form of video news releases that did not disclose the source of their creation.

Most recently, the GAO flagged "news" reports produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The two-minute reports, carried by stations reaching 22 million people, looked like local TV news stories and never mentioned that a federal agency had written, paid for and produced them.

In response to a request for an investigation by Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Los Angeles, the non-partisan GAO found that "Since ONDCP did not provide the required disclosures, (its) prepackaged news stories constituted covert propaganda in violation of publicity or propaganda prohibitions."

The Department of Health and Human Services pulled the same thing last year. "There, as here," the GAO report said, "the prepackaged news stories were narrated by a person who purported to be a private news 'reporter' but was actually hired by the agency's contractor to read scripts prepared for and approved by the agency."

While Waxman told the Washington Post that "it is illegal to use taxpayer dollars to influence public opinion surreptitiously," there's little that's likely to be done to stop the practice.

In defending himself, Williams apologized for what he called "bad judgment." At the same time, lie suggested that he was not a journalist but a pundit and columnist. Having come up through the public relations business, he said he lacked the ethical training journalists usually receive.

But it's a short, slippery slope between putting on paid political consultants like Paul Begala and James Carville as pundits, between Sinclair Broadcasting presenting as news a biased film about Sen. John Kerry, and having guys like Williams flak for the administration.

Carelessness has been allowed to creep into journalism, and tales like Williams' are bound to be repeated as the lure of cashing in--on ratings, access to information and celebrity--becomes the fuel of choice for the news machine.

Jonathan Diamond is assistant managing editor of the Business Journal.