{"id":5420,"date":"2005-10-03T10:26:53","date_gmt":"2005-10-03T14:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5420"},"modified":"2005-10-03T10:26:53","modified_gmt":"2005-10-03T14:26:53","slug":"armstrong-williams-contract-was-illegal-time-for-a-refund","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/armstrong-williams-contract-was-illegal-time-for-a-refund\/","title":{"rendered":"Armstrong Williams’ contract was illegal; time for a refund?"},"content":{"rendered":"

About a month ago, the inspector general for the Department of Education wrapped up a probe of the agency’s proclivity for paying pundits to promote the president’s policies. The investigation’s final report<\/a> said there was a systematic problem, but no laws were broken<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Federal investigators probing the Education Department’s public relations contracts have found a pattern of deals in which advocacy organizations received grants totaling nearly $4.7 million to promote Bush administration education priorities in newspaper columns and brochures, but didn’t disclose that they received taxpayer funds, as required by law. <\/p>\n

The department’s inspector general says he detected no “covert propaganda,” but he told administration officials to consider asking for some of their money back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem here had everything to do with how one defines “covert propaganda.” Inspector General John Higgins used an exceedingly narrow definition — so much so that his own report concluded that the administration contracted repeatedly with private media outlets to tout administration policy with a carefully-crafted political message without notifying the public that the government was paying for the message, but that this wasn’t covert enough<\/i> to run afoul of the law.<\/p>\n

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office did its own review and came to the opposite conclusion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Bush administration engaged in “covert propaganda” in hiring conservative talk show host Armstrong Williams to promote a controversial education program, congressional investigators said Friday. […]<\/p>\n

“We find that the department contracted for Armstrong Williams to comment regularly on the No Child Left Behind Act without assuring that the department’s role was disclosed to the targeted audiences,” a letter from the GAO to the Education Department says. “This violated the publicity-or-propaganda prohibition.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As it turns out, however, taxpayers might get a refund<\/a>. Given what’s happened, it seems like the least Armstrong Williams could do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About a month ago, the inspector general for the Department of Education wrapped up a probe of the agency’s proclivity for paying pundits to promote the president’s policies. The investigation’s final report said there was a systematic problem, but no laws were broken. Federal investigators probing the Education Department’s public relations contracts have found a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}