Two more conservative columnists on the take

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http://mediamatters.org/items/200512170001#3

As the Year of Fake News comes to a close, two more conservative columnists have snuck in under the wire to join Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, Michael McManus, Charles Chieppo, and much of the Iraqi press among the ranks of supposedly independent "news" figures who turned out to be on the take.

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the conservative/libertarian Cato Institute and a syndicated columnist for Copley News Service, has admitted taking thousands of dollars in payments from Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing about topics Abramoff's clients were interested in. BusinessWeek Online reported that Bandow admitted "that he had accepted money from Abramoff for writing between 12 and 24 articles over a period of years, beginning in the mid '90s."

Bandow explained, "It was a lapse of judgment on my part, and I take full responsibility for it."

It must have been quite a "lapse" to have lasted "a period of years." Suzette Martinez Standring, president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, doesn't buy Bandow's explanation, saying what Bandow did "isn't a lapse in judgment, it's soul-selling."

BusinessWeek Online reported: