What is it with these guys? The Bush administration showed its respect for an independent media by putting pundits on the payroll, Jeb Bush did the same thing, and now Mitt Romney is getting in on the fun.
Governor Mitt Romney’s administration has awarded a $10,000 contract to a Boston Herald op-ed columnist to promote the governor’s environmental policies.
The columnist, Charles D. Chieppo, started working yesterday with the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs.
His job calls for writing op-ed pieces and internal documents ”to support the efforts of senior management to promote education, awareness, and acceptance of major policy initiatives” on the environment.
Chieppo will keep writing opinion pieces for the conservative Boston Herald, where’s he’s already written overtly flattering, “highly supportive” columns on the Romney administration. Any chance his new taxpayer-financed paycheck might introduce another element of bias in his work?
It’s a shame Romney, like his Bush brother allies, find these kinds of “arrangements” appropriate, but one really has to wonder about media professionals who enter these kinds of contracts in the first place.
Bob Zelnick, who chairs Boston University’s journalism department, said in an interview yesterday that the Chieppo contract raised ethical questions.
”I think it is inappropriate, bordering on improper, for a person to be writing a column one day and consulting actively in a paid position for the administration the same day or even the next day,” Zelnick said. ”I think that blurs the lines between legitimate journalism and politics [in a way] that serves neither the administration nor the public and certainly not the newspaper.”
And the principle of journalistic independence suffers another setback.