JOSH MARSHALL says that there’s an op-ed payola scandal (to use Jeff Jarvis’s term).

I guess this ought to be a scandal, but it’s not as if this kind of thing — or worse — doesn’t happen all the time. I personally have had offers — declined, I should note — to pay me to write opeds for undisclosed third parties under my name, and if people are making these kinds of offers to me, that probably means there’s a lot more of it going on out there. Josh, on the other hand, also talks about opeds that are “ghost-written,” which seems to me a lesser scandal. (In fact, if you were to read my ethics book — the relevant chapter of which is available free online here — you’d see just how common that kind of thing is; scroll down to the section headed “motes and beams.” As Charles Krauthammer wrote: “If lying about authorship is now a hanging offense, there are not enough lampposts in Washington to handle the volume.”) Ghostwritten opeds, in which the person whose name appears on the byline agrees with their reasoning and conclusion, seem to me to be rather minor items of scandal indeed compared to what else is out there.