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

journalistic standards

[Profane MuthaFucka]

So, are they suggesting that Bloggers should be held to journalistic standards? Absolute rubbish. The journals that are given away freely here on /. are nothing but blogs. To even think that these should be bastions of journalism is just mind boggling.

Why not criticise People magazine, or the Enquirer? Same thing, I think. Even Jon Stewart of the Daily Show calls his show "fake news".

Politics

[gmajor]

Thank you, Michael, for going out of your way, and out of the story's way to point out Republican "badness". (That was a sarcastic remark)

Why can't the same be done for liberal-biased articles from the NY Times that get posted on Slashdot? Or why can't Michael Moore writeups highlight his twisting of the truth?

Yes this is flamebait, but so is the article writeup.

Re:They don't equate them

[FatRatBastard]

Except that Markos said he wasn't being wasn't for policy, but for "technical" consulting.

But for the record, I will not discuss my role within the Dean campaign, other than to say it's technical, not message or strategy. I will also not discuss any of my other clients, including their identities (I have non-disclose agreements to which I must adhere).

However, according to Zephyr Teachout the money wasn't paid to Kos for any technical consulting, but to buy his loyalty.

On Dean's campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.

While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

It was basically all message.

Still pales in comparison to what Armstrong did.

Re:Blogging doesn't need to be transparent.

[CmdrChillupa]

Theoretically you could hold the same thing up for any form of media: online, print, tv. If people stop reading or viewing it because they think it's untruthful ad sales go down and it dies.

I hold out CBS, Fox News and Michael Moore documentaries as examples that prove you wrong.

CBS did a story that was proven wrong. They apologized. The left still loves them, the right hates them now.

Fox News. Need I say more. The left still hates them, the right still loves them.

Michael Moore is really just in here to be a balance. Some think his stuff is true, some think it isn't. The left loves him, the right hates him.

There are plenty of media outlets that survive because the wacko leftists and rightists will support it because no matter how wrong it is it's inline with their beliefs.

Re:It was transparent

[Derling Whirvish]

Claiming it was "technical work" like web-site designing is a far cry from being paid for influence peddling. That's not "transparent" at all. It's devious and disingenuous.

Re:Important distinction.

[Guano_Jim]

Ever hear of "matching funds"? That too is your tax money.

Dean didn't accept matching funds.

Re:Ok, here it goes.

[Kiryat Malachi]

Actually, from what info I could find on what they were actually *paid* to do, his role was mainly technical/strategy, in the sense of trying to help determine strategy, not in the sense of promoting it. They were paid for their work setting up the electronic infrastructure of the Dean campaign, and for their advice on direction of that infrastructure. Nowhere were they contractually obligated to promote Dean's message, as far as I can tell.

If you have any evidence to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing it. Even Zephyr isn't claiming they were contractually obligated to support the campaign; she's just stating that it was "implied", which is her view; Markos might have had a different understanding.

Re:Very transparent.

[STrinity]

One more reason we should be able to mod the actual stories and not just responses to them.

Happened all the time here in South Dakota

[Anonymous Coward]

We here in South Dakota witnessed a pretty awful campaign between Tom Daschle and John Thune. The Thune people, in particular, were very skilled at paying high-profile and articulate conservatives to run blogs attacking the state's leading newspaper, the Argus Leader (whose editorials supported Daschle), attacking people who worked for Daschle, and attacked Daschle's policies.

In FEC filings from the Thune campaign, numerous bloggers received between $500 and $1500 per filing to blog. T-shirts, printed using Republican party funds, were given free supporting these blogs.

In most cases, the people getting paid to bash Daschle were already going to do so, for free. But by paying them, they could spend more time ripping the guy apart. I suspect it didn't have much effect in the end, but the money the Republicans spent on PR blogs was puny compared to what they spent on other stuff.