Aguila Blanca
Staff
It gets muddy.Glenn E. Meyer said:Some of the payoffs aren't terrible. Bart Skelton gets paid for articles he actually wrote. What's wrong with that? Is it a conflict of interest - if so, that's minor.
I suspect many of the members don't know it (I wasn't aware of it, until this flap erupted), but the NRA does not actually publish any of the NRA magazines. Ackerman-McQueen does (or did). So if Bart Skelton received payment for writing articles for the NRA magazines, he would have been paid by Ackerman-McQueen, not by the NRA. Of course the money ultimately came from the members' pockets, but it's not as clear-cut as the NRA hiring board members directly.
That said, there are other gun writers whom Ackerman-McQueen could have hired. For Bart Skelton to sit on the board and accept a commission to write for the NRA magazines shows a decided lack of sensitivity to the fundamental meaning of "conflict of interest." Many aspects of this mess are downright stygian. Others, such as (perhaps) Skelton's articles and payments, just help to prove the validity of the old saying that "The appearance of a conflict of interest is often more damaging than the fact."