Kos & MyDD blogs paid by Dean Campaign

http://zonkette.blogspot.com/2005/01/financially-interested-blogging.html


Financially Interested Blogging
I think the ethics question is a serious one, which I’ve brought up elsewhere and fought with Markos Zuniga, and several others in the blogosphere, about. In this past election, at least a few prominent bloggers were paid as consultants by candidates and groups they regularly blogged about.

There is a big difference between bias and direct financial interest in the subject of your blogging. The temptation and culture is ripe for interested blogging, and its already happened a lot in politics – I am sure it happens in other fields as well.

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.

At least, as far as I know, both sites actually disclosed that they were on the payroll of the Dean campaign (i know for a fact that Kos did and didn't read MyDD enough at the time). For me, it's all a matter of disclosure.

This is a far cry from anything ethically questionable - if you don't want to read a blog who's operator is being paid by a campaign, you have no need to, as long as the operator makes it clear.

On the other hand, we have cases like the 2 Pro-Thune, anti-Daschle bloggers who were both paid by the Thune campaign and did not reveal that they were being paid until after the election.

Similarly, the Armstrong Williams matter is another case where a writer was being paid and did not disclose his own personal financial interest in the article.

Disclose the fact that you're being paid, and leave it to the reader to choose whether or not to visit the site, and there's no ethical concerns left.

that they weren't being paid for the quality or clarity of their insights....

I like 'em, but their limitations are pretty glaring. They're pissed off at not getting taken as seriously as they'd like, of course.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/01/15/BAGR14A8Q71.DTL

Web forum shapes political thinking
Dean consultant in Berkeley builds 'blog' into influential tool

SNIP..."On a modest street in the flats of Berkeley there's a little yellow bungalow behind a shabby fence. It's one of those places you expect to find a pit bull, but instead you find a bright young mayor of a city of about 70,000 liberal activists, writers, kibitzers, kidders and some folks who clearly have a lot of time on their hands.

The city that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga runs isn't named Berkeley. It's called Daily Kos ("Kos" was Moulitsas' Army nickname) and it's a city in the metaphorical sense, reached by mouse and keyboard.

Daily Kos is a political Web log, or "blog," an online diary where diarists can post anything they want. The political blogosphere is divided into right and left halves, and this one is on the liberal side. It's run by a man who is a paid consultant for Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, although he will accept any Democrat instead of President Bush.

SNIP...." Lately, Moulitsas has been trapped in his bungalow off Sacramento Street handling a record number of postings because of Monday's Iowa caucuses. He constantly posts polls and analysis, written in "skeletal" style so members of his community, known as "Kossacks," can contribute their own analyses, cracks and rants. Political insiders are among the most avid fans.

"I'm a reader. I think Markos has done an incredible job," said the president of the New Democrat Network, Simon Rosenberg, a centrist who worked in Bill Clinton's famous "war room" during the 1992 campaign and continued working for Clinton throughout his presidency.

"Kos is one of the places I go for full-time information every day," Rosenberg said. "If people like me do that, you know it's having an impact."

Fact is, my consulting work for Dean was noted in over a dozen articles written at the time. And it was disclosed in this post, and in a front-page disclaimer, right under the site logo. (See the site on the Way Back Machine, and also notice how the Meetup graphic was for the Democratic Party, not the Dean campaign.)

So what's going on? Zephyr is obsessed with imposing journalistic standards on the blogosphere. We can debate the merits of this issue, and good points can be made on both sides (I think it's a dumb idea). But what Zephyr did, and which I find unconscionable, is that she took the Armstrong Williams issue, and made up shit about our involvement with the Dean campaign to score points.

And "made up shit" is the right way to word it. Jerome created the first Dean website in early 2002. He created the first Dean-centric blog. He signed up the Dean campaign for MeetUps and convinced Trippi to promote the service. In other words, Jerome was the father of the Dean netroots. That's why the Joe Trippi (not Zephyr!) eventually hired "us" (and by "us", I mean Jerome). As that WSJ article notes:

more
http://www.dailykos.com/