<![CDATA[Zephyr Teachout imagines Maureen Dowd being a paid consultant to Howard Dean with an exclamation point, after disclosing that some of the bloggers paid by the Dean campaign were hired not for their expertise but in order to get them to talk more or more favorably about Governor Dean. We know President Bush did this with his No Child Left Behind bill when he paid Armstrong Willams $240,000 to talk up the legislation; Armstrong, recognizing he was busted, has claimed it was “bad judgment.” It was unethical and illegal, since government funds are not allowed to be used to promote legislation.
But, to the fantasy of a New York Times columnist working for a candidate: Dowd would have to quit all her professional journalistic work, as David Gergen did when he was an advisor to Presidents Reagan and Clinton (he’s the best bipartisan example, but even Ed Murrow took a job with the Kennedy Administration). There’s a clear line among journalists that Armstrong trampled on, but it’s no less disturbing that the motivation for hiring bloggers was:
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.
This is now getting routine – Simon Rosenberg hired Matt Stoller, presumably not just because he’s got good ideas, but because he already has a “commentator,” “spokesperson,” role within the blogging media. The scale is infinitely smaller, but its odd to live in a world where we don’t blink when commentators are hired as spokespeople. Imagine Howard Dean hiring Maureen Dowd!
Zephyr immediately begins the remediation of the problem by asking for solutions and suggesting that while bias is unavoidable, financial bias is “highly avoidable.” (Not necessarily true—I don’t know why people don’t recognize that there are instances where people research and write about a subject to learn or document it rather than to issue judgments based on preexisting bias; it is also possible to make a judgment based on preexisting values that is colored by, but not biased by, those values) She concludes: “Its early enough in the self-publishing community to work on building a culture where financially interesting blogging is publicly rejected.”
The thing is, all publishing is financially interested in something. Every posting by a political consultant leads to consulting gigs, every posting by a technology pundit contributes to winning a contract or book deal. Zephyr discounts transparency as the solution while simultaneously saying that in the legal and journalist professions “you never, never don’t take conflict seriously.”
Of course, I get paid to blog (see my next posting, the weekly acknowledgment of sponsors), but I’ve decided not to write about the service and been criticized for that decision while others have talked about the product paying for the exposure—all of them disclosing the conflict. I write about the sponsorship program’s progress, since that is a subject I care about and am not being paid to discuss. My journalist bones, though, won’t let me talk about the product’s features or its competitors, though some people think I will (haven’t yet). Likewise, a blogger working on the Dean campaign might talk about their work.
But a campaign hiring someone hoping they will talk about the campaign without requiring they disclose the conflict is a little filthy, isn’t it?
As Zephyr points out, too, this is not about throwing stones but about looking at this astonishing object of contemplation that is taking shape through and around us.
Our thinking together about this now will help to create a strong culture of disclosure and conflict management. She’s right that it is early and that culture can establish the rules for a fair and comprehensible. She’s wrong that bias and financial interest should be seen as “completely different topics,” though I know what she means; they are intimately related, though they should not be conflated.
Hopefully, those lucky enough to be among the invitees to define such things at Harvard will keep in mind that clear differences between financial and personal bias are often illusory. I find it bizarre that we’ve already arrived at a point in the evolution of blogging where an elite is invited to discuss while most of the world watches; why weren’t people at least nominated from among the blogging public?
After learning that the motivation for hiring bloggers for non-blogging advice was to influence their blogging makes me all the more skeptical of what I took to be the genuine passions of individuals for a political candidate. ]]>
5 replies on “Wishful thinking or ethics?”
Why Don’t Techno-Utopians Read Political Theory?
I’ve been reading some interesting chapters for a book in process on Extreme Democracy. It’s edited by Mitch Radcliffe and Jon Lebkowsky. It includes one my favorites, Clay Shirkey’s piece on blogs, power laws, and inequality,
Mitch –
You’ve got a few details wrong. Kos was already a huge Dean supporter and Williams had taken a hiatus from blogging while working for Gov Dean. I am not sure your skepticism is warranted.
Also, Teachout’s verion of events has been contradicted by just about everybody involved. Check out Laura Gross’ view of this controversy. (Link: Laura adresses the issue in her comments section of the post)
Aside from that, it’s good to see that you appear to be doing well. Have fun out here on the east coast.
Greg—I don’t think it’s a matter of having the facts wrong, but that a senior member of the Dean team said the motive for these hirings was to increase blog posting in favor of Governor Dean. Kos was a supporter, but the idea appears to have been to increase his vocal support.
Anyhow, it’s worth noting, since skepticism is the most valuable tool in a reader’s arsenal. Otherwise, I don’t know what you mean “out here on the East coast”—that’s one place I won’t be moving….
Sorry, i thought you were visiting the colder side of the continent (Where I now begrudgingly reside) at the Harvard Blogging/Journo conference. For some reason I thought I saw your name on the panel. Maybe it was just a link.
I should have said that your post was missing a few details rather than saying you got them wrong. You have my apologies on that.
But my point remains that Teachout’s assertion has been widely and flatly denied by not only the parties involved but by many of those who were actually making the strategy decisions.
Unless this is a double-secret coordinated conspiracy, what we have is exactly what we had in 2003. We knew Kos was paid when we read his blog. He put it at the top of his template. And Jerome was not even writing.
IMHO, the shine has not been taken off the apple.
BTW, good blog.
And if you ever do find yourself a couple hours west of Boston, I’ll buy you a beer….. unless it will influence your writing. (OK. Bad joke.)
Of course it would influence my writing! Here is my writing on beer:
See, worse jokes follow bad ones!
On whether Zephyr, who was in charge of Web outreach for the campaign, is lying or not, I don’t know. I tend to take these kinds of comments seriously from people operating at her level in a national campaign. The only higher authorities are Trippi and Dean and Trippi’s comments were very opaque.
I can say that as one of the loose network of people they tapped that I saw no evidence of quid pro quo influence, but there was certainly an urgency about our writing more and more enthusiastically about Governor Dean and the campaign.
The fact that Kos is explaining it as “I’m an activist” to justify his position is interesting data, too. It’s a non-denial denial.
Since I wrote extensively about the campaign, I can only say that I wasn’t paid. If I had been paid to write favorably about the campaign, I would have stopped writing about the campaign, because I don’t do PR. I acknowledge sponsor-advertisers, which is very much upfront in the old journalism tradition, but that is where I come from.
And I write about the technical and business issues I am working on, but with disclosure and usually critically, which is why a lot of folks tend to trust me when I say something, because I don’t celebrate my own or my clients accomplishments excessively. In that sense, I am a participant commentator, very much like a political commentator. I understand the difference and manage it, which is what my comments about this situation urge people to think about.