Burnt Orange Report

The SCLM in Action Today

By Byron LaMasters

I was going ignore the whole "Howard Dean Paid Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas to write good things about him" non-story, because it's just that - a non-story that somehow found it's way into the Wall Street Journal this morning after this post by Zephyr Teachout. The so called liberal media, of course, jumped on this non-story, and made an even bigger non-story out of it. The story was in the San Francisco Chronicle a year ago, and Kos had a prominent disclaimer post when he began working for Dean, and displayed another disclaimer prominently on the first screen of the Daily Kos for the duration of his consulting work with the Dean campaign. I've been a regular reader of Kos since 2002, and you would have had to have been stupid or blind not to notice the disclaimer at the time. Kos and Jerome were not paid to write good things about Howard Dean - both of them were already supporters of Howard Dean, and were already writing positive posts about Dean. As for Jerome, he completely shut down his blog while he worked for Howard Dean.

In terms of ethics and blogging, I think that it's rather simple. Lots of bloggers work for candidates, elected officials, party organizations or committees, etc. There's nothing wrong with that. I think that proper ethics should be full disclosure. That's what we do here. Andrew works for the Texas Democratic Party, and he's mentioned that on numerous occasions. While he does not speak for the state party, his posts are possibly influenced somewhat by his job. There's nothing wrong with that as long as readers know it.

What really pissed me off about this whole non-story though, was how the mainstream media has taken off and run with it. Some have treated this similarly to Armstrong Williams being paid by the federal government. They're two completely different situations. Williams took $240,000 in taxpayer money to promote the Bush administration agenda without disclosing anything. Kos and Armstrong took a total of $12,000 ($3000 per month for four months) of a candidate's money to help the Dean Internet organization. I would say it was money well spent. Dean went from being nobody to the frontrunner largely because of his netroots internet organization. To grasp how utterly ridiculous the comparison of the Dean bloggers to the actions of Armstrong Williams, read Simon Rosenberg's thoughts and the nonpartisan Columbia Journalism Review.

Even worse is that the media is now engaging in outright lies. Bob Novak (of all people!) suggested that there was no disclosure (and Paul Begala hadn't done his research to correct him), and Bill O'Reilly claimed that "no one knew [that Dean had hired bloggers as consultants]" when it has been public record for over a year! Finally, O'Reilly said that the bloggers were paid $300,000 a month instead of $3,000, which was conveniently dubbed out in the reairing of the show. Talk Left has more.

Anyway, much of the lefty blogosphere is pissed off at Zephyr Teachout for bringing forward a story that had the potential to allow the right-wing media machine attempt to bring moral equivalence of the actions of Armstrong Williams to that of Kos and Jerome. It's annoying to see something that was news over a year ago get twisted and distorted, but I doubt that this non-story will have much of a shelf life. Methinks it'll be the Wall Street Journal authors that will look the silliest within a few days.

Posted by Byron LaMasters at January 14, 2005 10:33 PM | TrackBack