Secretary of Propaganda?

Mu over at Running Scared wants to know why the Bush administration doesn't just appoint a Secretary of Propaganda. Today Howard Kurtz tells us about another "pundit" who was paid for shill, Maggie Gallagher.

In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.

"The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples" and "educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage," she wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could "carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children."

But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.

What did Gallagher have to say?

In the interview, Gallagher said her situation was "not really anything near" the recent controversy involving conservative commentator Armstrong Williams. Earlier this month Williams apologized for not disclosing a $241,000 contract with the Education Department, awarded through the Ketchum public relations firm, to promote Bush's No Child Left Behind law through advertising on his cable TV and syndicated radio shows and other efforts.

Gallagher received an additional $20,000 from the Bush administration in 2002 and 2003 for writing a report, titled "Can Government Strengthen Marriage?", for a private organization called the National Fatherhood Initiative. That report, published last year, was funded by a Justice Department grant, said NFI spokesman Vincent DiCaro. Gallagher said she was "aware vaguely" that her work was federally funded.

So, it was "not really anything near" the recent controversy involving conservative commentator Armstrong Williams. In a sense I agree with her, since she was preaching to the already converted and everyone else saw her as the wingnut twit she is. I'm sure we are going to find that many more pundits were on the administration's payroll. My suggestion is that rather than a Secretary of Propaganda it should be called what it is, the Secretary of Corrective Thought.

Update
Joe Gandelman makes an excellent point, this was just plain stupid.

Didn't it ever occur to those folks in the adminstration that if they paid money to people who comment on their policies, even if the commentators are SINCERE the payments would sandbag the validity of their comments if ever the news got out? Apparently there wasn't much heavy thinking on the part of the admininistration as well.