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

Michael:

[Anonymous Coward]

Please shut your hole.

Thanks.

michael

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to believe that michael is prominently inserting his own views into stories he posts on Slashdot in order to promote a personal agenda, but he is. (Disobeying editor rule #1, "Leave your political bias out of it") Nevertheless, there's an interesting, deeper issue: how horrible of an editor is michael? When will his reign end?

WSJ slightly less partisan than al Hayyat

[gelfling]

Seriously we used to be able to count on the insanely partisan aspects of the WSJ left on the Op_Ed pages at the back of Section A. But it's creeping all over the paper now until it's practically the print version of Fox News. WSJ is about as partisan as the official Egyptian press now.

Does this shock anyone?

Your precious religion is fake.

[Ayanami Rei]

Also, the grandparent is wrong. I find that people who argue against religion (in general) are moderated down fastest because that's not "PC".