News article calls Armstrong Williams "The Biggest Whore of All"

[itzamirakul]

Armstrong is called a "GOP HUSTLER" by the Black Commentator.

www.blackcommentator.com

Cover story on home page
Issue 121
January 13, 2005

<snip>
Armstrong Williams is "the premiere Black political whore in America," wrote Black Commentator Co-Publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble in our December 12, 2002 issue. In the interest of full disclosure, we revealed our particular grievance: that Williams had hopelessly polluted "America's Black Forum" (ABF), the first nationally syndicated Black news interview program on commercial televsion, CREATED BY FORD AND GAMBLE IN 1977. "Since the mid-Nineties," we wrote, "ABF has devolved into a menagerie of professional Black propagandists in service of the most vicious elements of the Republican Party. It is a bizarre experience." ABF had become "America's Black Right-wing Forum." For a time, white rightwing columnist Pat Buchanan was a regular guest on ABF. So it came as little surprise that the program...finally became just another brothel in Armstrong Williams political red light district - a quickies venue for paying customers like Bush Education Secretary, Rod Paige.

<snip>
"He's tainted fruit," said The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) vice president for broadcast, Barbara Ciara. "And he's unfairly indicted all commentators who have their own independent opinion, don't need a script from the administration and don't need to be paid off." But of course, Armstrong Williams has never been a journalist, nor has he ever uttered or written a word that could qualify as straightforward political commentary.

Williams has been a rightwing political operative for hire... "Williams' purblic relations firm, the Graham Williams Group, co-founded with Oprah boyfriend Stedman Graham, specializes in serving 'public policy organizations' - the institutional Right. He is the Hardest Working Man in Ho' Business."

<snip>
A MUCH LARGER CRIME
Although Williams richly deserves public excoriation, self-righteous journalists of all ethnicities and persuasions are missing the big story. Rod Paige's $240,000 propaganda payment to Williams is puny compared to the tons of cash the Department of Education lavishes on organizations pushing school vouchers and privatization - more that $75 million by the end of 2003...More than a year later that figure has almost certainly passed the $100 million mark in grants and "contracts" to groups whose mission is "to discredit the very concept of public education."

<snip>
Any focus group could inform corporate media that Armstrong Williams is among the most despised personalities in black America - right up there with his old friend and boss, Clarence Thomas.

[itzamirakul]

1. Kick n/t

[yorgatron]

2. what i want to know is

how many OTHER whores there are.i know,most of the MSM are whores,but these are the ones that got paid extra for their "service".

[FreeStateDemocrat]

3. NYT: All the President's Newsmen

Published: January 16, 2005
(SNIP)

But the Jan. 7 edition of CNN's signature show can stand as an exceptionally ripe paradigm of what is happening to the free flow of information in a country in which a timid news media, the fierce (and often covert) Bush administration propaganda machine, lax and sometimes corrupt journalistic practices, and a celebrity culture all combine to keep the public at many more than six degrees of separation from anything that might resemble the truth.
On this particular "Crossfire," the featured guest was Armstrong Williams, a conservative commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist (for papers like The Washington Times and The Detroit Free Press, among many others, according to his Web site). Thanks to investigative reporting by USA Today, he had just been unmasked as the frontman for a scheme in which $240,000 of taxpayers' money was quietly siphoned to him through the Department of Education and a private p.r. firm so that he would "regularly comment" upon (translation: shill for) the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind policy in various media venues during an election year. Given that "Crossfire" was initially conceived as a program for tough interrogation and debate, you'd think that the co-hosts still on duty after Mr. Carlson's departure might try to get some answers about this scandal, whose full contours, I suspect, we are only just beginning to discern.
But there is nothing if not honor among bloviators. "On the left," as they say at "Crossfire," Paul Begala, a Democratic political consultant, offered condemnations of the Bush administration but had only soft questions and plaudits for Mr. Williams. Three times in scarcely as many minutes Mr. Begala congratulated his guest for being "a stand-up guy" simply for appearing in the show's purportedly hostile but entirely friendly confines. When Mr. Williams apologized for having crossed "some ethical lines," that was enough to earn Mr. Begala's benediction: "God bless you for that."
"On the right" was the columnist Robert Novak, who "in the interests of full disclosure" told the audience he is a "personal friend" of Mr. Williams, whom he "greatly" admires as "one of the foremost voices for conservatism in America." Needless to say, Mr. Novak didn't have any tough questions, either, but we should pause a moment to analyze this "Crossfire" co-host's disingenuous use of the term "full disclosure."

(SNIP)
Must read story connects some of the dots: Williams, Novak, Cheney, Sinclair Broadcasting, Crossfire and it appears in the entertainment section???? Who is Frank Rich and why is saying all these terrible things?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/arts/16rich.html

[itzamirakul]

4. Frank Rich is, of all things an ART critic at the NYT...

I posted this story from the NYT online article earlier today. It was buried way back in the arts section and nowhere near the front page where it should have been

www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/arts/16rich.html

It is so impressive that I hope more people read it.

Spelling edit