Blogging and Sponsorship and Openness

Jane_the_Great writes "In an article in the Wall Street Journal it is "revealed" that during the 2004 primaries, the Howard Dean campaign hired bloggers hoping that positive things would be said of Dean in the blogs. The news is from the horse's mouth." It's hard to believe that the WSJ is equating prominently disclosed campaign consulting with secret payments from the U.S. Government treasury to TV personalities in order to promote Republican policies, but they are. (Obeying media rule #1, "Both sides are equally bad", even if they aren't.) Nevertheless, there's an interesting, deeper issue: how transparent should blogging (and all media) be? How could transparency possibly be enforced?

Comments

It was transparent

[gtaluvit]

Markos addresses it Here

He was transparent about it and kept a constant reminder about it at the top of the page. Hardly close to the Williams scandal.

not about result but motives

[feelyoda]

This is interesting because it doesn't matter what Daily Kos thought it was getting into with an advisory roll. The Dean folks intended to get good, free press from it, and milked the blogs. Read more about it here.

For those who think the issues with the Dept. of Education paying off a journalist are new, it was actually more common under the Clinton administration, and equally bad.

Re:Sources please?

[Kiryat Malachi]

Columnist denying it.

USA Today nailing him on it.

Washington Post doing the same.

FCC investigation into Armstrong Williams payola.

Seriously, this is not a conspiracy; it happened. You can argue whether (as USA Today states) he was contractually obligated to be favorable towards vouchers, but he definitely took money to run ads on them... and immediately afterward, wrote columns favorable of the Bush administration's position on the issue. This would be *incredibly* questionable, in and of itself. If he took the money with an additional obligation of running those columns, it is quite possibly illegal.

Re:They don't equate them

[Kiryat Malachi]

Markos was different because it wasn't secret; he openly admitted he was on payroll, and even had a disclaimer at the head of his blog.

Re:They don't equate them

[Mike Markley]

... Except that if you read the rest of the article, it wasn't particularly secret.

Mr. Moulitsas said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.

You think those bloggers might have responded yet?

[bharlan]

Hmm, I wonder if those bloggers might have posted any response to this story? After all, they've only had 12 hours so far today. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/14/02014/6287 , http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/1/13/231623/665 , and http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/004427.html

Re:Sources please?

[torinth]

He's obliquely referring to Armstrong Williams who owned the last week of non-tsunami news. The Department of Education gave him about $240,000 of taxpayer money to promote the No Child Left Behind program. Neither he nor the department disclosed this payoff while he received frequent airtime as an independent commentator and television host. Since we generally pretend that independent means "not paid gross sums of government money to promote government policy" there was a big stir when this news broke.

It's not a conspiracy, and very few on either side of the aisle have stepped up to defend him. His story is what has prompted current coverage of payoffs and disclosures.

Don't forget Thune

[gad_zuki!]

Where's the "Zephyr" police and the WSJ on these guys? No disclosure here. Where's the outrage? Oh right, the Republican double standard. From here.

The two leading South Dakota blogs - websites full of informal analysis, opinions and links - were authored by paid advisers to Thune's campaign.

The Sioux Falls Argus Leader and the National Journal first cited Federal Election Commission documents showing that Jon Lauck, of Daschle v Thune, and Jason Van Beek, of South Dakota Politics, were advisers to the Thune campaign.

The documents, also obtained by CBS News, show that in June and October the Thune campaign paid Lauck $27,000 and Van Beek $8,000. Lauck had also worked on Thune's 2002 congressional race.

Both blogs favored Thune, but neither gave any disclaimer during the election that the authors were on the payroll of the Republican candidate.

outrageous

[Jane_the_Great]

I'd like it noted that in my original submission, there were no quotation marks around the word revealed. I find it disgusting that michael would change my submission and still attribute it to me.

He should be fired.

Re:outrageous

[Ray Radlein]

He's an Editor. He edits. I've had two article submissions accepted here; both of them have been edited before going out with my name still attached to them. That's just the way Slashdot has always operated.

Furthermore, "reveal" deserved scare quotes around it in that sentence -- given that not only was it something that was public knowledge, but that it was something that the Wall Street Journal had, themselves, mentioned before in articles about both Markos and Jerome.

If I wrote a lead sentence of "The Wall Street Journal revealed yesterday that George W. Bush is President of the United States," I would certainly expect an editor to either add scare quotes, change the verb "reveal" into something more appropriate, or do something else to, well, edit my sentence.