Buying the Blogs

There's a rumble in the blogosphere today regarding the admission by some prominent bloggers that they received payments from campaigns to push their candidates. The Wall Street Journal starts off an article on the subject with this:

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.

I personally have no problem with someone making a living from their writing, or even accepting funds for advocating one position or another. An honest person will disclose the support they're receiving, and then the readers can decide for themselves whether they should pay attention to what the guy is saying.

You'll definately see more of this in the future. The explosion of blogs in the past year makes them a viable source of advertising and promotion, and influential blogs can create a lot of media noise (look what happened when Power Line and Little Green Footballs took after the Rathergate story).

For the record, no one is paying me to write anything on this blog. In fact, there may be some willing to pay me to stop - I don't know.

That doesn't mean I can't be bought.....try me.