Ahem:

Our friend Jon Romano, press secretary for the inside-the-beltway PR campaign “Fix the Debt” and its pet youth group, The Can Kicks Back, have been caught writing op-eds for college students and placing the identical op-eds in papers across the country. This is the latest slip-up in Fix the Debt’s efforts to portray itself as representing America’s youth. Previously, they were caught paying dancers to participate in a pro-austerity flash mob and paying Change.org to gather online petition signers for them.

What makes this kind of thing especially noteworthy is that it’s coming from people who get very special treatment from the press. As Ezra Klein noted a while ago,

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions. At Tuesday’s Playbook breakfast, for instance, Mike Allen, as a straightforward and fair a reporter as you’ll find, asked Simpson and Bowles whether they believed Obama would do “the right thing” on entitlements — with “the right thing” clearly meaning “cut entitlements.” A few days earlier, Ron Fournier, the editor of the National Journal, wrote that President Obama was giving America “the shaft” by taking an increase in the Medicare age off the table.

We now know, by the way, that raising the Medicare age wouldn’t even save a significant amount of money.

But fawning media apparently aren’t enough; they need astroturf too.