Bloggers paid for good press?

[Mycroft]

Dean Campaign Made Payments To Two Bloggers

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.

Source.

I suppose it's legal, blogs by their very nature are without the sort of organization that might make this against the rules. It still seems disapointing, though.

 

[Psi Baba]

Bloggers are just nobodies with half-assed opinions. Williams was a professional journalist--bound (supposedly) to uphold certain ethics. Big difference there. CBS fired four people for what they did and have admitted their error in judgement. As yet we don't know who authorized payment to Williams. The administration has not (and likely will not) owned up to it, much less actually hold anyone accountable for it. One wonders how many others are on the payroll . . .

 

[aerocontrols]

Let's not forget that, unlike Lefty blogger Kos, the Righty blogger at Daschle vs. Thune took money from the Thune campaign and did not disclose.

Like Armstrong Williams.

I fail to see anything wrong with what Kos did. He had a link to his disclosure post on his front page throughout the campaign.

 

[Random]

Jesse Taylor addresses this particular accusation against him here .

 

[rikzilla]

Bloggers are just nobodies with half-assed opinions.

In many cases you are correct, but that's the beauty of it. There are blogs from soldiers fighting in Iraq, blogs from ordinary people in Ukraine speaking of how it was to be in the midst of the election turmoil. Blogs from Thailand and Indonesia about the Tsunami. Bloggers helping identify bodies...helping in the relief effort.

They're nobodys...but there are lots and lots of them. We can read them, and then x-check them with many, many other bloggers at the same location.

What do we get with mainstream journalism? A pompous overpaid "somebody" who was traditionally harder to fact/bias check....and was essentially disconnected from what he was reporting on. Bloggers are not only ordinary people who find themselves in the right place at the right time with a cool story to tell...they are also real experts in various fields.

Take the CBS memo thingy for instance. It was a blogger who also happened to be an expert in typesetting and wordprocessing software who spotted the fake almost instantly and then reported it as such.

Blogging may be the beginning of a sea-change in journalism, but at the very least bloggers will be fact-checking the hell out of MSM talking heads....that's not a bad thing. The MSM will have to be very careful about the veracity of what they report...which is what they were supposed to be doing all along.

-z

 

[Random]

Take the CBS memo thingy for instance. It was a blogger who also happened to be an expert in typesetting and wordprocessing software who spotted the fake almost instantly and then reported it as such.

The bloggers did not prove the memos were fake. Every “proof” the conservative bloggers put up in the first few days of the scandal (typefont, proportional spacing, Microsoft Word documents, etc.) was shot down one by one. The conservative bloggers were wrong on just about everything. All they did was raise doubts.
It was the real journalists asking CBS questions about the memos and their origins that really caused the problems for Rather. CBS found that they could not verify the documents were authentic. The bloggers cried triumph, even though this could easily have turned into another “Kerry affair” non-scandal had CBS been able to back the documents up.

 

[aerocontrols]

The bloggers did not prove the memos were fake. Every “proof” the conservative bloggers put up in the first few days of the scandal (typefont, proportional spacing, Microsoft Word documents, etc.) was shot down one by one. The conservative bloggers were wrong on just about everything. All they did was raise doubts.
It was the real journalists asking CBS questions about the memos and their origins that really caused the problems for Rather. CBS found that they could not verify the documents were authentic. The bloggers cried triumph, even though this could easily have turned into another “Kerry affair” non-scandal had CBS been able to back the documents up.

You and I have a different definition of 'shot down'. I suggest you peruse CBS's own internal report on the subject, here . They hired yet another document examiner, Tytell, who confirmed the conclusions of various bloggers, some of whom were experts in typeface or contacted and interviewed such experts on their own.

Therefore, he concluded that Times New Roman could not have been available on a typewriter in teh early 1970s and the Killian documents must have been produced on a computer.

I would excerpt a larger portion of the document, but those controlling the document have turned off the ability to cut and paste from it. As you can see by following my link, they've placed Tytell's report in an appendix rather than in the main document, in which they maintain the CBS party line of 'we can't tell whether the documents are real or not'. Perhaps they need to keep fishing for document experts.

Tytell pretty much confirms what the bloggers who 'raised doubts' were saying, and those who write the report have no rebuttal but hyperbolic doubt: There could be some possibility Tytell hasn't considered. None that anyone can bring to light, of course.


You're right, though... If CBS had been able to back up their documents, it would have been a non-scandal. They would have to be less obviously phony for that to have happened, however. I'm just glad Burkett (or whoever) wasn't smart enough to type them out on an old typewriter.

 

[LTC8K6]

CBS has not admitted anything as far as I am concerned.

Those documents have been conclusively proven to be fakes many times over to anyone with an open mind.

This investigation's own expert also concluded that the documents were fakes, yet the report's conclusion still refuses to call them fake.

The report glosses over the political bias issues.

The report by these investigators is just more whitewash, imo.

If they admit the docs are fake, they will be open to legal action, and that will result in a legal requirement to reveal where the docs came from.

 

[aerocontrols]

If they admit the docs are fake, they will be open to legal action, and that will result in a legal requirement to reveal where the docs came from.

Legal action by Staudt, maybe. Bush wouldn't take them to court, and he wouldn't win if he did.

They've revealed where the documents came from - Bill Burkett. They didn't want to admit that at first (considering Rather's statement that his souce was "unimpeachable" one can understand why) but they've admitted it now.

As for going after Burkett to see if he created them himself, which seems most likely, or got them from someone else, I wish you luck, but an admission by CBS that the documents are fake won't take us any further down that road.

MattJ

 

[Mycroft]

The bloggers did not prove the memos were fake. Every “proof” the conservative bloggers put up in the first few days of the scandal (typefont, proportional spacing, Microsoft Word documents, etc.) was shot down one by one. The conservative bloggers were wrong on just about everything.

Are you for real?

I followed this story, these issues were not "shot down" as you claim, but were answerd with really unlikely hypotheticals. That font could have been used, there were machines that could do super-scripts, some type-writers could do proportional spacing...yet nobody could put all these features together in one machine that was available at the time, and the machines that did have these features were very expensive, a pain in the arse to use, and extremely unlikely to be found in a National Guard administrative office.

 

[rikzilla]

The bloggers did not prove the memos were fake. Every “proof” the conservative bloggers put up in the first few days of the scandal (typefont, proportional spacing, Microsoft Word documents, etc.) was shot down one by one. The conservative bloggers were wrong on just about everything. All they did was raise doubts.
It was the real journalists asking CBS questions about the memos and their origins that really caused the problems for Rather. CBS found that they could not verify the documents were authentic. The bloggers cried triumph, even though this could easily have turned into another “Kerry affair” non-scandal had CBS been able to back the documents up.

Others have already answered you far better than my meager abilities allow and I thank them one and all. The only thing I have to add is that the blogger phenomenon is not a bad thing. Maybe you think the pajamahedin are bad because they burned someone you admire, but it just as easily could have gone the other way. Blog fact checking is a sword that quite properly cuts both ways....and since it's likely to cut through alot of future MSM BS and obfuscations I think it's a good thing.

Oh and one more thing;

-z

 

[Random]

Aw Jeez. Just spent some time doing a more thorough researching job.
Mea Culpa! Mea Maxima Culpa!

Apparenty I am wrong, or at least any possiblity of my being right hangs on finding a specific thirty-year old custom typewriter golfball.
When the controversy first came up, I saw conservative bloggers popping up with suspicious frequency coming up with rather silly claims “the Times Roman font did not exist back then”, “no typewriter has proportional spacing”, etc. And I saw each of these get shot down. Several websites presented evidence supporting the theory that they were written on a typewriter, including wear patterns on more commonly used letters and slight variations from the mainline. It seemed clear to me at least that authentic or not they were written on a typewriter, and the wingers were blathering on about Microsoft Word. The authenticity would be proven or disproven by talking to the source of the letters.
I was mildly interested for a time, but after Rather admitted that they could not verify the authenticity of the memos, I frankly lost interest. CBS had made an unforgivable blunder in presenting the letters if they could not be authenticated, and there was no point in supporting them further. So I missed the more conclusive evidence that the documents were fraudulent, and highly unlikely to have been made with a typewriter of that period.
The result was I held a set of beliefs that were inconsistent with reality. I apologize.

 

[crimresearch]

Random, you deserve every good word for taking the time to check out more details, and for replying with a correction of your original impression on the matter.

This board deserves a whole lot more of that type of discourse, and you are to be congratulated for setting a good example.

 

[aerocontrols]

Yes. Kudos to Random.

 

[Random]

Thank you, but on the whole, I think I would rather receive kudos for saying something witty or insightful than confessing to a colossal screw-up.

 

[aerocontrols]

Thank you, but on the whole, I think I would rather receive kudos for saying something witty or insightful than confessing to a colossal screw-up.

I'll keep my eye out for an opportunity, then

 

[headscratcher4]

I think the issue is a little different than posted here. Yes, I think that bloggers taking money and not disclosing is a problem, bad jorunalism and ethically questionable. However, it seems to me that there might be a big difference, whether disclosed or not, of one of these folks taking money from a campaign (like Dean or Thune) as opposed to what Williams and the Bush Administration.

What is really troubling about the Williams issue isn't just the non-disclosure, it is the use of taxpayer money to promote propoganda and do so, one must assume specifically so that the propogandist is seen as indipendent (even if supportive) of the government. Not only is this unethical and ultimately, I think, illegal. It is a slippery slope. Ultimately, what is the difference between Williams and Bahgdad Bob? Sure, that is an inflated analogy, as BB was a state functionary, but Williams was taking money from the State to bolster the state line. It is essentially the creation of a state-controlled media (and here I was thinking that was fox's role... )

 

[Beerina]

Paid bloggers is just the beginning. There was a news article on TV that talked about:


- People paid to hang out in chat rooms, especially teenage ones, and puff this or that movie or product

- People (models) paid to hang out in bars drinking this or that crappy new product and just stand there and mention absently to no one about how good it is.


So a fraudulent blogger is just another twig on the pile

 

[headscratcher4]

People have been paid to hang out in chat rooms for a very long time...what do you think I'm doing here?

 

[Silicon]

The problem isn't that bloggers or even journalists or pundits are on the take.

Well, that's bad of course. But it's beside the point.

The problem is that the GOVERNMENT is strictly forbidden by law to do this sort of thing.