{"id":137,"date":"2005-01-11T09:46:28","date_gmt":"2005-01-11T13:46:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/?p=137"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T04:00:00","slug":"payola","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/?p=137","title":{"rendered":"Payola"},"content":{"rendered":"

From USA Today<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\\President Bush is an eloquent advocate of his 2001 education overhaul known as the No Child Left Behind Act. He calls it the “most dramatic reform in public education in a generation” and a powerful remedy for “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”<\/p>\n

But lately his administration apparently has concluded that the law needs a harder sell based on deceptive practices. Last week, USA TODAY disclosed that the Department of Education had paid conservative pundit Armstrong Williams $240,000 to tout the measure on his syndicated talk show and to periodically interview Education Secretary Rod Paige.\\<\/p>\n

While I guess it should come as no surprise that conservative commentators are bought and paid for, this is still troubling.<\/p>\n

In the radio industry this is known as “\\Payola”, which is defined as “\\The paying of cash or gifts in exchange for airplay.” A Payola scandal erupted in the late 50’s and early 60’s, when Disk Jockey Alan Freed was convicted of accepting bribes to play specific music. Congress later passed the anti-payola statute, under which payola became a misdemeanor, penalized by up to $10,000 in fines and one year in prison. Since then the anti-payola statutes have been applied in a much broader context, including hidden marketing in computer programs, and so forth.<\/p>\n

The FCC is quite clear that payola is not restricted to payment to play music<\/a>. For details of the law, reference sections 317 and 507 of the Communications act.<\/p>\n

Is there a reason this case of payola is not being investigated as a federal crime? Should not the people responsible for paying hidden money for airplay also be indicted?<\/p>\n

I’m sure if this were a liberal commentator receiving money from the DNC, for example, there would be screams of indignation and calls for an investigation. Somehow I doubt that will happen in this case, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From USA Today: \\President Bush is an eloquent advocate of his 2001 education overhaul known as the No Child Left Behind Act. He calls it the “most dramatic reform in public education in a generation” and a powerful remedy for “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” But lately his administration apparently has concluded that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.folsoms.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}