By arthur Weinreb
January 21, 2005
The recent controversy over armstrong Williams saw the blurring between commentators/columnists and journalists. Williams, a radio commentator and syndicated columnist accepted $241,000 from the U.S. Department of Education to promote and advertise the government’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) laws.
It is one thing to criticize Williams for taking the money; it is another to accuse him of breaching journalistic ethics. By holding him to those journalistic ethics, the assumption is being made that he is in fact, a journalist.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote about Williams under the headline of "Recent Williams flap gives journos a bad name", stating that he is a journalist. and USa Today, the newspaper that broke the story, while referring to Williams as a commentator wrote that Williams had encouraged other black journalists to support NCLB, thereby inferring that Williams was in fact a journalist by the insertion of the word "other". But armstrong Williams claims he is not a journalist.
as reported in Editor and Publisher, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists backed up Williams in his claim that he is not a journalist.
When it comes to bias in the media, commentators and columnists are sometimes held to the same standards that journalists are. But they shouldn’t be. When the mainstream media is accused of having a left-wing bias, the counter-argument is often made that there is a right-wing bias in american talk radio. But that is like comparing apples with oranges. Commentators and columnists express their opinions; they do not purport (despite the numerous times that Rush Limbaugh says that you can get all the news you ever need to know from him) to report facts as news. They are expressing their opinion and there is no need for commentators and columnists to be fair or unbiased. They are listened to or read because they have certain opinions and ideas. all commentators and columnists are required to do is to be accurate about the facts that they state.
The fact that armstrong Williams is a commentator and a columnist does not necessarily make what he did, right. But he should not be labelled as a journalist and held to the ethics of that profession.