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.

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.