The New York Times has fired television and movie personality Ben Stein as a Sunday business columnist for violating the paper's ethics guidelines by hawking a questionably credible credit product.

According to the Web site, gawker.com, Stein has contributed to the Times for the past four years, but that term ended in early August with the Times enforcing its conflict-of-interest policy.

“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,” Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis wrote in a press release. “Ben didn’t understand when he signed on with FreeScore that this might pose a potential conflict for him as a contributing columnist for the Times, because he hadn’t written about credit scores or this company. But, we decided that being a commercial spokesman for FreeScore while writing his column wouldn’t be appropriate.

“We are sorry to lose him as a columnist, and appreciate his work for the Times over the years.”

According to a Reuters blog, Stein complained vociferously about his firing.

“Of course, there was no conflict of interest. I had never written one word in the Times or anywhere else about getting credit scores on line. Not a word,” Stein wrote. “But somehow, these people bamboozled some of the high pooh-bahs at the Times into thinking there was a conflict of interest.”

Stein is known to many people as the monotone economics professor in the 1986 movie, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” as well as as a pitchman for Clear Eyes eye drops and the host of an Emmy-winning game show, “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” But he also had a serious career in politics at one time, serving as a speech writer and lawyer for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.