Maggie Gallagher's performance on Thursday's NewsHour had to be seen to be believed. She had been lumped in with Armstrong Williams in several news reports, and she finally had a chance to get her side of the story out:

Gwen, thank you. I don't agree with the introduction that you just made. It's not true that I was paid to advise the Bush administration or to promote Bush marriage policies.

I'm a marriage expert. I've spent 20 years on research and public education on marriage. And three years ago HHS approached me and said, we don't have anyone with expertise on the marriage issue, and particularly on the social science evidence on marriage, would you produce some specific products for us? Would you write some, would you draft some brochures; would you draft an essay for Wade Horn gathering the evidence on marriage education; would you come down to Washington and speak to regional HHS managers, reviewing the social science evidence and how marriage matters.

And I said yes. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I don't think HHS did anything wrong. It's just not unusual for experts to be asked to do work for the government in their fields of expertise...

Gwen, you know, this has been retailed in so many newspapers and in the New York Times and the Washington Post, thank you. And the, you know, when Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post called me up, he did not ask me what he later published. He did not say, "Maggie, I'm going to write a story that says you took money from the Bush administration to promote marriage policy. What's your response to that?" which I think was a mineral [sic; probably "minimal"] responsibility; instead he called me up and said, Maggie, do you think you should have disclosed you had a government contract to do perfectly legitimate work when you later wrote columns, as I've been going for 20 years, on marriage, including some that support the Bush marriage initiative.

And I got off the phone; I spent ten minutes saying, if anyone had said to me, Maggie, do you think you should mention that you've done some work for HHS and the marriage issue, I would have said, sure, I have nothing to hide. I have no intention and motive to hide. I think it's true that I should have disclosed it.
But what we have now is a national coverage in which my name, you know, I'm not rich, I'm not that famous -- all I have is my reputation. And my name is, you know, in dozens of newspaper articles, in national nightly news reports, it's being reported - a completely false charge, which is that I took money from the Bush administration to promote its marriage policies. It's not true...

I think they cut her microphone off at the end of the segment. Nevertheless, it was good to see her have a chance to state her side of things rather than the wishful thinking propagated by, for instance, Salon:

One day after President Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries to stop hiring commentators to help promote administration initiatives, and one day after the second high-profile conservative pundit was found to be on the federal payroll, a third embarrassing hire has emerged...