Remember Bush crony Karen Hughes's controversial hiring as "undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs," our nation's public relations emissary to the Arab world? Hughes retired to spend more time with her family, and now the AP has learned [1] that the Bush administration has named her replacement: James Glassman.

So who is James Glassman? Read on, dear reader, read on.

It's the fall of 1999. The dot-com boom is going strong, and Glassman, formerly an honest business journalist and managing editor of Roll Call, co-authors Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market [2], which argues "Stock prices could double, triple, or even quadruple tomorrow and still not be too high." He had been a mere talk show host and financial columnist syndicated by the Washington Post. Now he was a superstar--for telling the Masters of the Universe exactly the fantasy they wanted to hear. In a column previewing the book, he pronounced that the Dow Jones Industrial Average would rocket from ten grand to 36,000 "tomorrow, not 10 or 20 years from now." (We writers call this rhetoric style, citing the original Greek, the "Penthouse Forum [3] letter approach.")

Glassman catapulted his berth on the best-seller lists into a for-profit web site, Tech Central Station, "a cross between a journal of Internet opinion and cyber think tank open to the public," proffering "a high-tech agenda of freedom and opportunity." Promptly, the Dow then began its two-year long shedding of 30 percent of its value. All the while, Glassman pulled down over 100 lecture gigs a year, trumpeting, "We are on the verge of a tremendous wealth explosion, the likes of which has never been seen."

Poster child for the proposition that the best way to rise in Washington foreign policy circles these days is to have been wrong. The market, with far greater wisdom, has downgraded Mr. Glassman's stock; you can pick up a copy of Down 36,000 on the used book site Alibris.com. [4] for a rock-bottom $1.99. Glassman, however, still landed a column on the Post business page, and in 2002 he published The Secret Code of the Superior Investor: How to Be a Long-Term Winner in a Short-Term World (available on Amazon for forty-nine cents [5], but don't short the stock, I'm sure that at least could double, triple, or even quadruple tomorrow and still not be too high).

So how does one become a long-term winner in a short-term world? Publish a journal of opinion, of course. Tech Central Station began in 2000. Glassman presented his enterprise as high-minded and public-spirited—"a kind of watchdog in an area in which few people seem to be doing long-term principled thinking on public policy"—and it looked it. Tech Central Station read like any other online opinion magazine: clever, witty writers making arguments about what you should believe about the world and why, just like The New Republic or National Review—or Slate and Salon.

Yet TCS mysteriously thrived where other Internet startups hemorhaged cash. How? Why? An extremely important 2003 Washington Monthly [6] article by Nick Confessore(from which I draw the above narrative) describes how Glassman actually prospered by pioneering a bold new brand of pay-for-play "journalism."

Wrote Confessore:

"As a writer and public figure, Glassman has, over time, aligned his views with those of the business interests that dominate K Street and support the Republican Party; he has also increasingly taken aggressive positions on one side or another of intra-industry debates....

But TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one—the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Wwashington.... As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also "sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.

Confessore had to coin a brand new word in order to capture what Jim Glassman was up to: "journo-lobbying." Confessore explained it as a watershed, a breakthrough: K Street lobbyists had always dreamed of possessing a genuine vector of influence in the media world, and had never been able to achieve it. Until Jim came along. His little lobbying newsletter was treated, by the ink-stained wretches, as just another honest broker of opnion—wrote Confessore, "cited hundreds of times in the mainstream media and reprinted on op-ed pages across the country."

Glassman, meanwhile, raked in the cash. Howzit work? Confessore:

Unlike traditional think tanks, Tech Central Station is organized as a limited liability corporation--that is, a for-profit business. As an LLC, there is little Tech Central Station must publicly disclose about itself save for the names and addresses of its owners, and there is no presumption, legal or otherwise, that it exists to serve the public interest. Likewise, rather than advertisers per se, TCS has what it calls "sponsors," which are thanked prominently in a section one click away from the front page of the site. (AT&T, ExxonMobil, and Microsoft were early supporters; General Motors, Intel, McDonalds, NASDAQ, National Semiconductor, and Qualcomm, as well as the drug industry trade association, PhRMA, joined during the past year.) Each firm pays a sponsorship fee--although neither Glassman nor any of the sponsors would disclose how much--and gets banner advertisements on the site. When I contacted a few of the sponsors, each described their relationship to TCS in a slightly different way. An Intel spokeswoman said that TCS was "a consultant" to the computer-chip maker. AT&T's representative said her firm was "a funder." A Microsoft representative explained that the company "is constantly looking for ways to educate on some of the critical and important issues in the technology sector."

On closer inspection, Tech Central Station looks less like a think-tank-cum-magazine than a kind of lobbying practice. Which makes sense: Four of the five co-owners of TCS are also the co-owners of the DCI Group, the Washington public affairs firm founded by Republican operative Thomas J. Synhorst. TCS's fifth owner is Charles Francis, who is also a senior lobbyist at DCI and is listed on TCS's phone directory. And as it happens, three of TCS's sponsors--AT&T, General Motors, and PhRMA--have also retained DCI for their lobbying needs. (Both DCI's spokeswoman and TCS's chief executive officer declined to be interviewed for this article. However, after I requested comment, the Web site was changed. Where it formerly stated that "Tech Central Station is published by Tech Central Station, L.L.C.," it now reads "Tech Central Station is published by DCI Group, L.L.C.")

Like its publishing arm, DCI's business is to influence elite opinion in Washington. But instead of publishing articles, DCI specializes in what's known as "corporate-financed grass-roots organizing," such as setting up front groups to agitate for a client's position, placing letters to the editor with key newspapers, and using phone banks to generate calls to politicians. TCS, for its part, includes a disclaimer on its site noting that "the opinions expressed on these pages are solely those of the writers and not necessarily those of any corporation or other organization." But it is startling how often the opinions of TCS's writers and sponsors converge.

Last July, for instance, PhRMA retained DCI to lobby against House legislation that would permit the reimportation of FDA-approved drugs from Canada and elsewhere. The same month, TCS put out a press release announcing that it planned to cover an upcoming bus trip taken by Canadian patients to "access prescription drugs and medical treatment" in the U.S. (The trip was sponsored in part by the Canadian subsidiaries of many of the same pharmaceutical companies that belong to PhRMA.) A few days after the press release was issued, TCS columnist Duane Freese published an article touting the bus trip and attacking the legislation; other contributors also wrote columns for the site attacking reimportation.

Confessore went on, in rich detail, with AT & T as the case study in Glassman's horrific brand of pay-to-play "journalism."

So what did the Washington conservative intellectual elite have to say about this? The ones always crowing how they'd won the "war of ideas"? This movement of principle? What did they make of one of their own chartering a fake opinion magazine where the opinions proffered tracked exactly to how much the subject was willing to pay?

Hurling thunderbolds, they excommunicated Jim Glassman from the conservative movement, of course.

Oh. Wait. That wasn't what happened at all. The American Enterprise Institute made him a fellow, then announced him as the new editor and publisher of their in-house opinion magazine, once called American Enterprise, newly spiffed-up and streamlined for a relaunch as the American. [7]

This is the man whom the Bush administration has presented to the Arab world as emissary of America's trustworthiness and good intentions.

He'll do a heck of a job, will Jimmie.