posted on January 14, 2005 03:13:06 PM new
from the WSJ today:
Made Payments
To Two Bloggers
By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY and JAMES BANDLER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 14, 2005; Page B2
Howard Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor's campaign in their online journals, according to a former high-profile Dean aide.
Zephyr Teachout, the former head of Internet outreach for Mr. Dean's campaign, made the disclosure earlier this week in her own Web log, Zonkette. She said "to be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal." The hiring of the consultants was noted in several publications at the time.
The issue of political payments to commentators has become hot following disclosures that the Bush administration paid a conservative radio and newspaper pundit, Armstrong Williams, $240,000 to plug its "No Child Left Behind" education policy.
With the growing importance of blogs -- short for Web logs -- Ms. Teachout said she thinks bloggers need to rethink their attitudes toward ethics. A blog is an online personal journal or series of postings, dealing with just about anything. Millions of people use blogs to post diatribes, rants, links to other sites and erudite analyses hourly, daily or sporadically. Some make a little money by selling ads. The Dean campaign's adroit use of the Internet helped make its long-shot effort credible.
Ms. Teachout's posting shook the confidence of many people in the blogosphere, as many bloggers like to call the online community. Bloggers have been quick to criticize the unspoken biases of mainstream media, and they helped expose the questionable documents used by CBS News in a report about President Bush's National Guard experience.
The partisan Democratic political bloggers who were hired by the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos. One helen often quoted DailyKos is the ninth most linked blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a measurement service, and in October, at the height of the presidential campaign, it received as many as one million daily visits.
The two men, who jointly operated a small political consulting firm, said they didn't believe the Dean campaign had been trying to buy their influence. Both men noted that they had promoted Mr. Dean's campaign long before they were hired and continued to do so after their contract with the campaign ended.
Mr. Moulitsas said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Dean said the two bloggers hired by the campaign did nothing unethical because both disclosed their connection to the Dean operation.
Ms. Teachout said the campaign never explicitly asked the bloggers to promote Mr. Dean. But she said the Dean campaign wanted to keep them from shifting to rivals. Ms. Teachout said she has been raising the issue as part of a broader push on her part to get bloggers who are also consultants to publish their client lists. She said that as more people have turned to bloggers for news, she came to the conclusion that bloggers "have an active responsibility to be absolutely transparent."
--Jeanne Cummings contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB110566243803425942,00.html?mod=todays%5Ffree%5Ffeature
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Four More Years....YES!!!
[ edited by Linda_K on Jan 14, 2005 03:16 PM ]
posted on January 14, 2005 03:27:55 PM new
Stop Bush Administration Pay-Offs To Journalists
The Bush administration has become addicted to taxpayer-funded, "fake news" propaganda - it's time for an intervention
News reports have revealed that the Department of Education used $240,000 of our tax dollars to hire Armstrong Williams, an ultra-conservative black columnist and talk-show host, to promote the controversial No Child Left Behind Act to his readers, viewers and colleagues in the media. Williams did just as the Department asked, praising Bush's signature education initiative in his columns as well as on his and other television shows. Repeatedly, he failed to inform his audiences that his comments were bought and paid for with their own taxes.
This is not an isolated incident or simply bad judgment. The Government Accountability Office found last year that the Department of Health and Human Services violated two federal laws by producing propaganda videos touting Medicare's new drug benefits which were misleadingly packaged to look like news reports from independent journalists. Last week, the GAO announced that the Office of National Drug Control Policy had also potentially broken the law by using taxpayer dollars to produce similar "fake news" video segments. Both agencies distributed the videos to news broadcasters, which in some cases aired them without telling viewers that they were watching government-sponsored propaganda.
Behind its rhetoric about moral values, the Bush administration is undermining ethical standards in government and attempting to hook the public on White House spin with undisclosed pay-offs to journalists.
posted on January 15, 2005 08:00:24 AM new
Yo! linduh, hear anymore about the big blogging scandal....you seem unusually shy about coming back to this thread you started
