NEWSHOUNDS.(The Talk of the Town)

"Mr. President," George W. Bush was asked at a press conference on January 26th, "do you think it's a proper use of government funds to pay commentators to promote your policies?"

"No," the President replied. "I expect my cabinet secretaries to make sure that that practice doesn't go forward," he elaborated. "Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet. I'm confident you'll be, over the course of the next four years, willing to give our different policies an objective look--won't you?" Then came the smirk, which has been making a post-election comeback. "Yes, I can see that."

The assurance, if not the smirk, was in order, because, until "that practice" came to light, using government funds to pay commentators to promote the Administration's policies seems to have been very much on its agenda. As USA Today had revealed a couple of weeks earlier, Armstrong Williams, a syndicated columnist (until his syndicate dropped him) and frequent cable-news talking head, got two hundred and forty-one thousand dollars from the Department of Education to shill for Bush's No Child Left Behind program. On the day of Bush's press conference, the Washington Post reported that Maggie Gallagher, a somewhat less widely syndicated columnist and "marriage expert" (who isn't?), had pocketed forty-one thousand five hundred taxpayer dollars for doing various chores on behalf of Bush's sexual-abstinence and marriage-promotion programs, such as ghosting an article under the byline of an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services in Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine whose publisher, Deal W. Hudson, was the "Catholic outreach adviser" to the Bush reelection campaign. (Later, after allegations of sexual harassment against Hudson came to light, he left the campaign and the magazine.) Finally, the day after the Gallagher disclosures, USA Today reported that yet another right-wing marriage expert slash syndicated columnist, Michael McManus, had been performing similar tasks for H.H.S., and more cheaply--he collected only ten grand. It appears that Gallagher and McManus, unlike Williams, were not explicitly required to use their columns to puff the government programs that were paying them, but it didn't hurt. Some observers were reminded of an old Fleet Street ditty:

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,, Thank God! the British journalist., But, seeing what the man will do, Unbribed, there's no occasion to.

But that's Britain. Here, no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Meanwhile, back at the press conference, Bush went on to the next question, pointing to a man who was sitting some rows back, and who was wearing a laminated credential identifying him as Jeff Gannon, a reporter for a news service called Talon News. "Thank you," the man said, and popped this poser:

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid [the Senate Democratic leader] was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work--you said you're going to reach out to these people--how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?