News reports that Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 by the Bush administration to promote its “No Child Left Behind” program to black families, has sent the media into a moral clucking frenzy. The idea that purveyors of information to the public might become paid advocates of governmental policies is hardly news. Other news stories advise us that some officials of the National Institute of Health received “consulting” fees – sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars – from drug companies; while prominent medical journals have expressed concern that published results of drug research are often the products of studies … Continue reading Armstrong Williams