Friday, January 14, 2005
To blog or to slog
Here's a big surprise. Not. Neither political side is less grimy about paying for hidden advertising than the other.
We learned from the Wall Street Journal today that "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." It seems that Zephyr Teachout (the Internet outreach head in Mr. Dean's campaign) announced the deed on her Web log (Zonkette), adding that "to be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment - but it was very clearly, internally, our goal." Her linguistic clumsiness aside, it's an amazingly forthcoming admission. (For the record, she named the two consloggants (my word - do you like it?): Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (DailyKos).)
And we learned a few days ago that some doofus in the Bush administration paid Armstrong Williams to plug GBW's education policy.
I'm not sure if the salient point is that we - the viewing and listening public - should assume that everyone is a paid shil or (as the auptimist noted on Monday) that journalists and bloggers should square their intellectual shoulders and take responsibility for what they write, say and show.
Bloggers sometimes have had a bit of a superior attitude based on (supposedly) owing allegiance to no one and therefore putting forth independent thoughts. I'd like to think that news writers (tv, radio, newspapers, internet, etc.) tell actual events without bias or point of view, but that's silliness. And I'd like to think that bloggers are individuals whose biases and points of view are evident, clear and clean, but that's not true either (at least sometimes). Just as our medium is getting its sea legs, people reveal themselves to be human after all.
I have faith, perhaps idealistic and foolish, that bloggers will take a moral highground of sorts and commit to being not merely casual mainstream but substantively different and (dare we hope?) better. It's up to us to decide and choose to make sure our noses are - and stay - as clean as we think / say / hope they are.
We learned from the Wall Street Journal today that "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." It seems that Zephyr Teachout (the Internet outreach head in Mr. Dean's campaign) announced the deed on her Web log (Zonkette), adding that "to be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment - but it was very clearly, internally, our goal." Her linguistic clumsiness aside, it's an amazingly forthcoming admission. (For the record, she named the two consloggants (my word - do you like it?): Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (DailyKos).)
And we learned a few days ago that some doofus in the Bush administration paid Armstrong Williams to plug GBW's education policy.
I'm not sure if the salient point is that we - the viewing and listening public - should assume that everyone is a paid shil or (as the auptimist noted on Monday) that journalists and bloggers should square their intellectual shoulders and take responsibility for what they write, say and show.
Bloggers sometimes have had a bit of a superior attitude based on (supposedly) owing allegiance to no one and therefore putting forth independent thoughts. I'd like to think that news writers (tv, radio, newspapers, internet, etc.) tell actual events without bias or point of view, but that's silliness. And I'd like to think that bloggers are individuals whose biases and points of view are evident, clear and clean, but that's not true either (at least sometimes). Just as our medium is getting its sea legs, people reveal themselves to be human after all.
I have faith, perhaps idealistic and foolish, that bloggers will take a moral highground of sorts and commit to being not merely casual mainstream but substantively different and (dare we hope?) better. It's up to us to decide and choose to make sure our noses are - and stay - as clean as we think / say / hope they are.
Labels: blogs (mine), gwb
Q
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