Stealth sponsorship of talking heads and op-ed columnists is surprisingly common, says Business Week.

In the opinion industry, pundits who present themselves as independent voices sometimes turn out to be quietly financed by powerful interests. The latest example BusinessWeek has unearthed: The Hill, a Washington newspaper read closely in Congress, published an opinion piece last June extolling “payday loans.” Readers weren’t told that the author, Tom Lehman, a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, had taken money from the industry that pushes these controversial high-interest loans.

In other instances, BusinessWeek Online has recently identified Douglas Bandow and Michael Fumento, two prolific authors of newspaper opinion pieces who received undisclosed payments from business interests they wrote about. Both lost their nationally syndicated columns as a result. Fumento acknowledged just last week that in 1999 he benefited from payments totaling $60,000 from agribusiness giant Monsanto Co. (), a subject of praise in Fumento’s opinion columns and a book. Scripps Howard News Service canceled his column. Bandow resigned last month from Copley News Service after he admitted writing as many as two dozen op-eds for which he was paid $1,000 to $2,000 each by embattled Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

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David Sirota elaborates on this phenomenon with this article on The Huffington Post

So, for instance, if you read the newspapers or listen to a congressional hearing, you might think that organizations like the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute are just naturally occurring organizations sprouting up from the a supposed overall extreme conservative economic slant of the American public. These institutions - which D.C. is teeming with - are cited as official-esque sources, described only in ideological terms as “conservative.” They are almost never labeled according to which industries fund them, just as the politicians who spew corporate PR are almost never identified in the media as having taken huge sums of cash from the industry being shilled for. It is as if naming the funders would be to offer the public too much truth about who owns their political debate - a major Establishment taboo.

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