Tell me again the one about bloggers lowering the standards of journalism.
A writer who turned out a stream of sympathetic newspaper stories about former HealthSouth Corp. CEO Richard Scrushy during his fraud trial says Scrushy secretly paid her $11,000 through a public relations firm and typically read her articles before publication.
Scrushy, acquitted in June of involvement in a $2.7 billion accounting fraud scheme at the chain of health clinics, strongly denied authorizing any payments to Audry Lewis, a church secretary whose freelance articles appeared in The Birmingham Times, a small but influential black, weekly newspaper.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press show that the PR firm wrote thousands of dollars in checks to Lewis and her pastor, Herman Henderson, who says he was paid to help bring fellow black preachers into the courtroom in a bid to sway the mostly black jury in Scrushy's favor.
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