The Washington Post today is reporting that syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher took money from the White House to promote government policy.

In 2002, she wrote multiple columns promoting a $300 million marriage defense initiative, but failed to disclose she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the policy. She took another $20,000 for writing a story for the National Fatherhood Initiative.

First Armstrong Williams, who took $241,000 earlier this month to promote No Child Left Behind in his columns, and now this. This needs to stop, ladies and gentlemen. This crap needs to stop now.

It’s a simple choice, journalists. If you want to be a columnist, be a columnist. If you want to be in public relations, be in public relations. You can’t have both. If you try to have it both ways, you will lose both.

But the blame does not fall squarely on columnists who should know better. The government should know better. Does President Bush have any idea how absolutely lousy it looks to pay off news columnists? It gives the appearance that money is the only way to make new initiatives and policies look good.

And a note to Washington — that’s not your money you’re spending on PR. That’s my money.

These bad apples also further reinforce mainstream journalism’s already lockstep groupthink. Despite mountains of evidence that the mainstream media has a liberal bias problem, the apparatchiks at CJR, AJR and Romenesko will point and state, “Well, these two columnists prove that no liberal bias exists anywhere.”

Fortunately, we can rest assured that newspapers will drop Gallagher’s column like a hot potato. As it should be.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin, who has consistently been the loudest voice opposing the government’s “pay to pander” program, speaks out.

UPDATE II: Gallagher offered a quasi mea culpa:

My first instinct is to say, no, Howard, I had no special obligation to disclose this information.
I’m a marriage expert. I get paid to write, edit, research, and educate on marriage. If a scholar or expert gets paid to do some work for the government, should he or she disclose that if he writes a paper, essay, or op-ed on the same or similar subject? If this is the ethical standard, it is an entirely new standard. I was not paid to promote marriage. I was paid to produce particular research and writing products (articles, brochures, presentations) which I produced. My lifelong experience in marriage research, public education and advocacy is the reason HHS hired me.

But the real truth is that it never occurred to me. On reflection, I think Howard is right. I should have disclosed a government contract, when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers.

It “never occurred to” Gallagher, a researcher? Disclosing conflicts of interest is a well-known tenet in research, not just journalism. The problem is not so much Gallagher being paid to stump for government initiatives, the problem is that she did so from a platform — in this case, journalism — that people (still) expect to be free of such obvious influences.

For example, Cal Thomas discloses in each column he writes mentioning Fox News that he is a regular contributor. This is his way of telling the reader, “Listen, I think Fox is great, but I draw a paycheck from them, so of course it’s great to me. Take my comments on the issue with a small grain of salt.”

Gallagher may be a great marriage expert. I used to think she was a great columnist, but it looks like she didn’t know as much on the subject as I expected her to.