Ben Stein Fired From NYT Column Over TV Commercial

Posted: Sunday, August 9, 2009 | Posted by Chico Brisbane | Labels: , , , ,


Frequent Fox News guest and prodaganda peddler Ben Stein has been fired from his Sunday column at the New York Times. The termination comes in light of Steins appearance in television commercials for FreeScore.com, a company Reuters Blogger Felix Salmon described as "a sleazy company which exists only to extract large sums of money from those who can least afford it." The company offers customers a free credit score but charges them substantially to actually review their credit report.

Last month, Salmon advocated for Steins firing from the New York Times saying that "Stein has become a predatory bait-and-switch merchant, dangling a “free” credit report in front of people so that he can sock them with a massive monthly fee for, essentially, doing nothing at all." and that the people who take him up on this offer will be those who can least afford it.

"The level to which Stein has now sunk is more than enough reason -- as if the case for the prosecution weren't damning enough already -- for the NYT to cancel Stein's contract forthwith. It's simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ as its "Everybody's Business" columnist someone who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy."




NYT spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed Steins termination, telling Gawker that “Ben Stein’s fine work for us as a columnist for Sunday Business had to end, we told him, after we learned that he had become a commercial spokesman for FreeScore, a financial services company.

In his blog at Reuters, Felix Salmon did a little chest pounding by posting: "You’ll forgive me if I take some small measure of credit for this one: after something in the region of 35,000 words of the Ben Stein Watch, the world’s worst financial columnist has finally been fired from the New York Times. And I couldn’t be happier." - Neither could I.
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