Is it my imagination or does it seem that a story like this one by Felicity Barringer appears about once a quarter in the New York Times these days?:

The Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency is seeking outside public relations consultants, to be paid up to $5 million over five years, to polish its Web site, organize focus groups on how to buff the office's image and ghostwrite articles "for publication in scholarly journals and magazines."

The strategy, laid out in a May 26 exploratory proposal notice and further defined in two recently awarded public relations contracts totaling $150,000, includes writing and placing "good stories" about the E.P.A.'s research office in consumer and trade publications.

The contracts were awarded just months after the Bush administration came under scrutiny for its public relations policies. In some cases payments were made to columnists, including Armstrong Williams, who promoted the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind and received an undisclosed $240,000. In January, President Bush publicly abandoned this practice....

The more extensive and expensive plan seeks help from public relations agencies to, among other things, "provide research, writing and editing of Office of Research and Development articles for publications in scholarly journals and magazines."

Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science magazine and a former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said in a telephone interview on Saturday that he found the idea of public relations firms ghostwriting for government scientists "appalling."

"If we knew that it had been written by someone who was not a scientist and submitted as though it were the work of a scientist, we wouldn't take it," Mr. Kennedy said. "But it's conceivable that we wouldn't know, if it was carefully constructed."

He added that the practice of putting public relations polish on scientific work has already been practiced by industry. "We had seen it coming in the pharmaceutical industry and were sort of wary about it," he said. "The idea that a government agency would feel the necessity to do this is doubly troubling."

Speaking of ghostwriting, Mr. Kennedy said: "If the ghostwriting is the kind of ghostwriting that most of the good mentors I knew did with Ph.D. students on first paper, it could be a good thing. But I sincerely doubt if any for-profit P.R. firm hired in the interest of improving a scientific publication is going to be the right person to do that."

....As for the issue of ghostwriting for journals, she said: "Nothing's been done. Nothing's been awarded. What they envisioned is looking at this very technical" material presented by scientists and making it accessible to laymen. The ghostwriters, should they ever be hired, [EPA spokeswoman Eryn Witcher] said, "can't make up the material. They are taking scientists' work and making it more understandable."

Why the hell didn't anyone mention that I could have hired PR people to pimp up my material before I handed in my friggin' tenure file???!!!