Heads finally rolled at CBS this week, but it's the Armstrong Williams case that appears to have legs. Look closely and you'll spot a pair of long, shapely gams hiding under the skirts of this demure payola story.

See, most media scandals share an annoying tendency: The wrongdoers either get off easy or, worse, wind up cashing in on their wrongdoing. Plagiarists and liars snag lovely book contracts. Abominable editors who are fired for screwing up don't limp off into obscurity as they should. The dirty dogs resurface as columnists. At CBS, various non-celebrities got the gate, yet Dan Rather is still on the payroll. No wonder there's a widespread sense that when it comes to the media, there's just no justice.

But now we have Williams, the pundit who secretly took $240,000 from the Department of Education in return for promoting Bush's No Child Left Behind program. At first glance, this one looks pretty cut-and-dried, and not exactly a blockbuster. After all, Williams is no major-league opinionizer. As he noted, he wasn't taken seriously by the media cream until he got into this spot of trouble.

It all seems to confirm the ugly trend—the worse you behave in American journalism, the bigger you get. Ah, but this is to ignore the unique role that money plays in such a story. Most media scandals aren't first and foremost about money; they're about the race to get attention, beat the competition, win prizes, or just make deadline. Those who cash in generally do so after they get caught, on the strength of their notoriety. Since the money itself comes after the lapse, when it flows to these miscreants, there's not much we can do about it.

But Williams had his big payday before his scandal broke. Indeed, this story is all about money and its influence on content. And since it was public money, journalists will now have a chance to obey their golden rule, and follow the Armstrong dough wherever it may lead. Rest assured they're doing exactly that right now.

Is it possible that a Cabinet department would buy off a nationally syndicated columnist and TV host without high-level White House involvement? Maybe Williams's third-tier status made his deal small potatoes inside the regime. But are there similar pundit-purchasing programs (PPPs) elsewhere in the administration? David Corn of The Nation reported this week that Williams told him "others" in the media are the beneficiaries of PPPs. That may well be a bit of protective smoke-blowing. Still, when White House spokesman Scott McClellan answered questions on the scandal this week, the air was so thick with passive constructions ("Questions have been raised about that arrangement. It ought to be looked into. ... "), the imagination had no choice but to reel.

More immediately, the Williams situation offers a rare opportunity to reverse the widespread sense that media people don't pay for their wrongs. Sure, he's lost the syndicated column he had with Tribune Media Services, and other sweet gigs will likely fall away. But can't you just hear the gears clicking elsewhere in Williams's behalf? He's a genuine celebrity now—surely there's a book in this for the man, or at least some movie rights.

But this time, there's a way to mitigate such rewards. A drama that's been unfolding in the business world offers a kind of model. On the same day the Williams story broke in USA Today came the news that former directors of WorldCom and Enron had agreed to pay millions of dollars out of their own pockets to settle their respective legal cases. "The payments," the Associated Press reported, "will mark one of the few times that executives who presided over corporate misdeeds have agreed to assume any personal financial liability for the resulting damage." The WorldCom deal requires most of the directors to pay at least as much as they earned for serving on the board while wrongdoing was afoot in the company. In an even closer parallel, journalist Thom Calandra, a former commentator on CBS Marketwatch, has just agreed to pay $545,000 of his own money to settle a fraud case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC alleged that Calandra used ! his column to pump stocks he owned.

Why shouldn't Armstrong Williams pay, too? The WorldCom and Enron cases are being settled to satisfy aggrieved investors, but since Williams took taxpayer money, the case for his returning the money is even clearer. In a chat with readers on WashingtonPost.com this week, Williams was asked more than once about returning the money. He said he wouldn't because he'd been paid to do a job and he'd done it; that the only mistake he'd made was not disclosing the arrangement. "We delivered on our goals and they delivered on their compensation."

That sentence alone deserves some kind of prize for candor about how the public's business is now done in Washington. Indeed, watching the Williams case unfold makes it feel like someone finally shined a light on a murky old swamp. Media figures have been "selling" themselves to people in government for years. But the pay the toadies traditionally get in return for their supportive opinions isn't actual money. It's access, invitations to fancy parties, phone calls from movers and shakers—the feeling of power.

Because those deals were largely unspoken and abstract, there was nothing we could do about them. But there's nothing abstract about $240,000. As this column went to press, Williams hadn't given the money back. He should, and let a scandal-weary nation believe there's still a shred of fairness in this media life.