In the opinion industry, pundits who present themselves as independent voices sometimes turn out to be quietly financed by powerful interests. The latest example BusinessWeek has unearthed: The Hill, a Washington newspaper read closely in Congress, published an opinion piece last June extolling "payday loans." Readers weren't told that the author, Tom Lehman, a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, had taken money from the industry that pushes these controversial high-interest loans.In other instances, BusinessWeek Online has recently identified Douglas Bandow and Michael Fumento, two prolific authors of newspaper opinion pieces who received undisclosed payments from business interests they wrote about. Both lost their nationally syndicated columns as a result. Fumento acknowledged just last week that in 1999 he benefited from payments totaling $60,000 from agribusiness giant Monsanto Co. (MON ), a subject of praise in Fumento's opinion columns and a book. Scripps Howard News Service canceled his column. Bandow resigned last month from Copley News Service after he admitted writing as many as two dozen op-eds for which he was paid $1,000 to $2,000 each by embattled Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
So, it's not just undisclosed payola. Sometimes, it's bribery from the masters of bribery.