Public relations

Welcome back to a new year at The New Spiel.

Meet Armstrong Williams. Editorial commentator, radio bloviator, frequent talking head. His shtick is that - get this - he's black, and he's also conservative! Oh, and he's also being paid $240,000 in taxpayer money by the Bush administration to shill for the No Child Left Behind Act.

The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004.

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in."

Is it just me, or doesn't taking money in return for creating favorable content about your benefactor without disclosing the arrangement to your audience mean you don't get to be on TV anymore? Imagine if George Stephanopoulos had been found to be taking money from the Kerry campaign to talk up Kerry's health care plan on "This Week." He'd have to quit, right? Well, this is like that, except this stooge is getting money out of your (and my) pockets.

In other media news, or perhaps I should say, in other news regarding illegal Bush administration efforts to influence media coverage of its actions, somebody's finally saying something about the phony prepackaged news reports the administration has been putting out. Basically, a guy pretending to be a reporter fluffs a Bush policy for a couple minutes and then signs off as if it were a news report. Of course, it comes straight from the administration, and straight from taxpayer resources.

''You think you are getting a news story but what you are getting is a paid announcement," said Susan Poling, managing associate general counsel at the Government Accountability Office. ''What is objectionable about these is the fact the viewer has no idea their tax dollars are being used to write and produce this video segment."

Notice a pattern? And this is just the stuff we've found out about.