Frankly, it also never occured to me to disclose that I am a poorly-designed animatronic doll remote-controlled by Wade Horn

The conspiracy theorist is right again. Again, folks, you are paying to brainwash yourself. How does it work? You pay your taxes to the government. The government pays a third party to conjure fantastical information. The third party feeds this information to you. You read the byline--an independent party, you think, disinterested and non-partisan--and give the article more creedence than you would if you had known that these are thoughts the government really wants you to believe. Then, for reasons that escape you now, you lumber to the polls and cast a ballot to entrench legal inequality in thirteen state constitutions.

Maggie Gallagher, a conservative columnist who has made a career--a lucrative career, it now seems--of piling vitriol upon same-sex families, was just revealed to have received $41,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services. She wrote brochures for the department, then drafted magazine articles for HHS chief Wade Horn.

She says it's not an ethical breach because she is like a "scholar," hired for her expertise and thus at no obligation to disclose her funders.

Wouldn't you like to know if a study that says abortion causes breast cancer was funded by an anti-choice organization? Or if a report on the necessity of school prayer was funded by the Promise Keepers? Or if a paean to No Child Left Behind was funded by Rod Paige?

It was more or less ethical for Gallagher to write the brochures, since, as she says, she is an expert at producing anti-marriage propaganda. It was not in any way ethical for her to write an anti-marriage piece for the National Review funded by the government, saying things the government wanted her to say, and then not telling her readers the impetus for the article.

It isn't as if the National Review wouldn't have published an article written by Wade Horn about Bush's anti-marriage initiatives. But an article by Wade Horn doesn't have the same cachet or same audience as an article published by a recognized columnist's voice. Filterning the Administration's message through a third party, supposedly independent, dresses up propaganda to look like an individual's reasoned opinion. A shifty tactic, but apparently effective enough to warrant at least $280,000 in taxpayer money (as has thus far been disclosed).

There are other names for this kind of work. We read about this in other countries and laugh. Sure, people ran back into burning homes to save portraits of Kim Jong Il. Sure, no one died on June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square. We enjoy a hearty laugh and we shake our heads knowingly about the odd tyrannies of other nations. And then we smugly read our personalized news on the Internet while clutching our lattés, sometimes pausing to lather on sunscreen to avoid being burned by our own enlightenment.

"Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?" Gallagher said yesterday. "I don't know. You tell me." She said she would have "been happy to tell anyone who called me" about the contract but that "frankly, it never occurred to me" to disclose it.

Thanks a lot, Howard Kurtz. Why d'you go and spoil a perfectly lovely delusion?

Columnist Backing Bush Plan Had Federal Contract (washingtonpost.com)