Pundit to Pay $34,000, Declares “This Is Over”
The Justice Department has reached a settlement with conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, closing a yearlong investigation into his promotion of the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” Act, Brian De Bose reported Sunday in the Washington Times.
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The agreement calls for Williams to pay the government $34,000, Williams confirmed to Journal-isms — not because of any wrong doing, he said, but because he did not fulfill all of the terms of his contract with the Education Department.
Williams said he had refused to attempt to influence minority journalists, as the contract called for, and produced only one ad for television and one for radio, rather than two for each medium.
“In other words, this is over,” Williams said of the government’s investigation of him. “I’ve paid my dues. We admitted no wrongdoing. There was nothing illegal or unethical. You have no idea how relieved I am that this is finally behind me” and Justice Department agreed “that we truly earned our compensation for the advertising campaign.” The department originally wanted him to pay back all of his $240,000 contract with the Education Department, the commentator told Journal-isms, but he had refused to do so on principle.
However, the finding of no criminal wrongdoing did not mean there was no ethical issue in Williams, as a columnist, accepting government money.
“The one thing I do regret, and I have always said this, is not disclosing this contract and my duties to my media clients who run my columns and broadcast commentaries,” De Bose quoted Williams as saying.
In a story posted Sunday night on usatoday.com, Greg Toppo wrote, “The Justice Department pursued Williams under the federal False Claims Act, which deals with false or fraudulent billing to the U.S. government. If the government had taken the case to trial, Williams could have faced about $64,000 in penalties for work that he was paid for but didn’t do.”
Toppo also noted that a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s non-partisan watchdog, found that the contract violated a government ban on “covert propaganda,” and that the Education Department’s inspector general “also criticized the contract, under which Williams, in addition to producing the videos, also agreed ‘to regularly comment on’ and promote the law during his syndicated TV show â?? and to encourage other minority commentators to do the same.”
The Williams case became emblematic of the Bush administration’s efforts to covertly influence the news media, and Williams became a household name. He received the Thumbs Down award from the National Association of Black Journalists. As a search was undertaken for other pundits taking government money, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher was discovered to have been touting Bush’s “healthy marriage” initiative while working on the program under a $21,500 contract from the Department of Health and Human Services.
De Bose reported in the Washington Times, “the final eight-page agreement among Mr. Williams, the Education Department and its subcontractor, Ketchum Communications, was reached Thursday” and sealed in “carefully worded settlement papers” that said Williams was not guilty of any criminal violations.
[Ketchum spokeswoman Robyn Massey said Monday, “Ketchum was not part of the settlement. The settlement was between Armstrong Williams and the Government.”]
“The incident damaged the reputations of many journalists because the public viewed many of the people used to promote the education law as journalists, not as opinion writers and pundits on television and radio talk shows,” De Bose wrote.
In January 2005, at the height of the criticism of the administration for attempting to “buy” commentators, President Bush told USA Today, where Toppo broke the story about the $240,000 contract:
“There needs to be a clear distinction between journalism and advocacy. I appreciate the way Armstrong Williams has handled this, because he has made it very clear that he made a mistake. All of us, the Cabinet, needs to take a good look and make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.”
Ketchum chief executive officer Ray Kotcher agreed that Williams was wrong for not having disclosed the information, writing an op-ed piece posted on the Web site for the industry magazine PRWeek. It was Williams’ contract with Ketchum that required him to create two television and two radio advertisements regarding No Child Left Behind.
The scandal caused Tribune Media Services to stop syndicating Williams’ column, which was carried by about three dozen papers.
“We always lose something in life,” Williams said Sunday, commenting on that decision. He said he lost 50 percent of the newspapers carrying the column, but that 30 to 35 percent of those who dropped it reinstated it. Williams also syndicated the column on his own, to the New York Amsterdam News, among others. He has also done commentary for MSNBC for the last six weeks, Williams said.
In the broadcast media, Williams was dropped by TV One and the defunct “America’s Black Forum,” but he gained a talk show on New York’s WWRL-AM.
The Williams scandal also led to a Federal Communications Commission investigation of video news releases designed to look like news reports, but produced by government agencies. Williams said that within the last year the FCC returned all of his materials to him, signaling an end to that part of the FCC’s investigation.
However, in July, the FCC issued 42 formal letters of inquiry to holders of 77 broadcast licenses in an attempt to detect stations that violated sponsorship rules requiring that sponsors be identified.
In an Oct. 6 filing, the Radio-Television News Directors Association contended that the commission’s investigation of the video news release use was wrong. The FCC’s sponsorship rules do not apply when there is no compensation for the material, the study on which it based its investigation was flawed and that the action was having a “chilling effect” on broadcasters’ free speech rights, it said.