In defense of Gallagher
You are by now aware of the story, but here's the recap:
In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.
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But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal.
In her own defense, Ms. Gallagher wrote today:
To me, this is an extremely serious charge. It is also completely false. I was not paid to promote the President’s marriage proposal. In 2001 I was approached by HHS to do research and writing, not on the President’s $300 million marriage initiative, but on marriage: specifically four brochures on the social science evidence on the benefits of marriage for populations serviced by HHS (such as unwed parents), a draft of an essay for Wade Horn, and a training presentation on the social science evidence on the benefits of marriage for regional HHS managers.
Anybody who's familiar with her work knows that Ms. Gallagher has been writing for years about marriage and families. Here's a piece she authored in 1997 -- well before the Bush administration came to town -- calling for an end to no-fault divorce.
She's a writer, a social scientist and a policy expert. She didn't go to the Government; it came to her. And she wasn't paid to write in favor of a particular program or piece of legislation. She was paid to write broadly about the benefits of marriage.
But Ms. Gallagher does have a syndicated column -- wherein, to my knowledge, she's never written about anything other than marriage and families -- and so I suppose that makes her a "journalist," broadly defined, which means she should have disclosed when she got a Government contract. But as she notes:
It is not uncommon for researchers, scholars, or experts to get paid by the government to do work relating to their field of expertise. Nor is it considered unethical or shady: if anything, government funded work is considered a mark of an expert’s respectability. Until today, researchers and scholars have not generally been expected to disclose a government-funded research project in the past, when they later wrote about their field of expertise in the popular press or in scholarly journals.
For these reasons, it simply never occurred to me there was a need to disclose this information. I certainly had no intention or motive to hide my work from anyone. As a journalist, however, when the question is raised "Should you have disclosed?" the answer is always, yes. It was a mistake on my part not to have disclosed any government contract. It will not happen again.
I believe that it just never occurred to her to disclose, and I believe she won't make the same "mistake" again. I hope we let that be the end of it.