The Conservative Press

Morbo is on a roll. This is definitely a Must Read:

These so-called journalists who would do Abramoff’s bidding(or, as it were, the bidding of his clients) have very little to gain by becoming hacks to this degree. Editorial board members at the Washington Times or the Boston Herald, unlike Tom DeLay or Bob Ney, don’t need campaign contributions. These guys would accept the trips and write the favorable newspaper pieces to a) be one of the “cool kids” on the right; and b) enjoy luxurious trips at exotic locales.

It didn’t even matter that these op-eds and columns would have no discernable effect on the policy at hand; Abramoff needed them to keep getting paid and the conservatives wrote them to keep getting the trips. Amazingly, no one seems terribly surprised by any of this and there’s been no talk about firing the journalists highlighted in Foer’s article. If a writer for a mainstream news publication traded trips for columns, he or she would be a laughing stock and would probably never work again. But when it comes to outlets like the Washington Times, the reaction is, “Yep, sounds about right.”

It’s not just that these right-wing writers are hacks — though they obviously are — but that the conservative system is so corrupt, it’s no longer stunning to read reports like this one.