It is an Imperfect World!

I am blogging a bit late about this but to me it is a good reminder for not putting too much faith in Op-Eds or any ‘ism.’ Here is what was reported on December 16, 2005 (link)

Also yesterday Copley News Service syndicated columnist Doug Bandow admitted accepting money from Abramoff for writing as many as 24 op-ed articles favorable to some of Abramoff's clients. Copley suspended the column pending a review and Bandow resigned as a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Paul Krugman added (link)

But it turns out that implicit deals between think tanks and the interests that finance them are sometimes, perhaps often, supplemented with explicit payments for punditry. In return for Abramoff checks, Mr. Bandow and Mr. Ferrara wrote op-ed articles about such unlikely subjects as the entrepreneurial spirit of the Mississippi Choctaws and the free-market glories of the Northern Mariana Islands.

BusinessWeek Online doesn’t mention it, but earlier this year an article by Franklin Foer in The New Republic titled “Writers’ Bloc,” which tracked Mr. Abramoff’s remarkable ability to get his clients favorable treatment on op-ed pages, pointed out that Mr. Ferrara endorsed another odd cause: U.S. friendship with Malaysia. (I’ve checked, and Mr. Bandow did the same.) I was particularly interested in that one, since a couple of years ago right-wingers accused me of having been a paid agent of the Malaysian regime. I wasn’t, but Mr. Abramoff reportedly was.

Mr. Bandow has confessed to a “lapse of judgment” and resigned from Cato. But neither Mr. Ferrara nor his employer believe that he did anything wrong. The president of Mr. Ferrara’s institute told BusinessWeek Online that “I have a sense that there are a lot of people at think tanks who have similar arrangements.” Alas, he’s probably right.

Let’s hope that journalists set out to track down those people with “similar arrangements,” and that as they do, they don’t fall into two ever-present temptations.

First, if the latest pay-for-punditry story starts to get traction, the usual suspects will claim that liberal think tanks and opinion writers are also on the take. (I’m getting my raincoat ready for the slime attack on my own ethics I’m sure this column will provoke.) Reporters and editors will be tempted to give equal time to these accusations, however weak the evidence, in an effort to appear “balanced.” They should resist the temptation. If this is overwhelmingly a story about Republican lobbyists and conservative think tanks, as I believe it is — there isn’t any Democratic equivalent of Jack Abramoff — that’s what the public deserves to be told.

All I am trying to say is, it is an imperfect world. What is touted as knowledge, could be an opinion based on money paid to write so! And before you add anything else, I am taking Krugman’s statement too with a pinch (or bucket) of salt.

And this post might make more sense to you if you have also seen this debate going in the Indian Blogsphere.