WSJ.com – Dean Campaign Made Payments To Two Bloggers — Here’s a big big problem developing that I think is the tip of a long-term iceberg. The bigger question is why did the Dean aide sell out the bloggers? That’s the back story unmentioned in the coverage. I suspect that the Republicans muct have been doing this too. and this revelation may be a way to take the heat off the buyout of “journalist” Armstrong Williams for $250,000 by the Bush administration. You cannot trust politicians either.
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….
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. 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.
In a slam piece about this, the or blasted the Daily KOS.
On Tuesday Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos, the most trafficked blog on the web, attacked me personally and erroneously for having written a column in the Union Leader (Manchester, NH) in which I defended New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary. “The author is a Republican, and a consultant. He stands to lose lots of cash if NH loses its leading role,” he wrote of me in his weblog.
Also on Tuesday the former Director of Internet Organizing for Dean for President, Zephyr Teachout, revealed that the selfsame Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (who goes by the handle “Kos”) had been a paid shill for the Dean campaign, accepting fees for promoting the campaign of the angry little ex-Governor of Vermont on his blog. Oh yeah, Zúniga also gave “advice” to the campaign.
As of this writing I see nothing about this on the DailyKos
I see less of an issue with Zonkette since she worked for Dean, apparently, when she started her blog. It was a obvious front. The left wing blogging community including the self-righteous few who see blogging as a revolution pooh-pooh all this citing this Daily KOS 2003 post as “good enough for them.” This is incredibly disengenuous since a post is a lot different than a visible disclaimer on the home page.
Kos himself covers issue here. No apologies. He amkes this interesting comment:
As one poster noted, it’s a target-rich environment out there. Let’s train our guns on the real enemy.
Who is the real enemy? Tell us!!!
via C. Coulter
Oh please. Did you see the WSJ article today?
They disclosed they were being paid at the time they worked for the Dean campaign, and they were paid as consultants, not as shills who were supposed to repeat Dean’s message.
This strikes me as a desperate attempt to get the heat off of Armstrong Williams, and perhaps others, who were paid with TAX DOLLARS to preach the administration’s talking points.
You obviously didn’t look very hard. This was posted last night.
http://dailykos.com/story/2005/1/14/02014/6287
What should Kos be apologizing about?
And since people need the reminder: Williams was paid $240,000 OF OUR MONEY and apparently illegally (i.e. government propaganda of this type is ILLEGAL).
Repeat: he was paid OUR MONEY and OUR GOVERNMENT paid him.
Nevermind that one blogger QUIT BLOGGING when he did Internet consulting with Dean and the other PROMINENTLY DISPLAYED A DISCLAIMER about his relationship.
Moreover BOTH BLOGGERS SUPPORTED DEAN BEFORE CONSULTING WITH THE CAMPAIGN.
So John, how exactly did these guys “sell out”?
And if you say you just meant it literally and not pejoratively, slap yourself. 😉
With the Dan Rather document scandal, I smelled a big RAT by the name of Karl Rove.
Somebody gave those bloggers a “heads up” about the false documents. Probably somebody gave them money, too. Who is the most likely? Karl “The Rat” Rove.
What a pathetic paranoid fantasy world Hank lives in.
It doesn’t take any money, and not even a whole lot of time, to realize that the document in question was produced on a modern computer using Microsoft Windows, not a 1970-vintage typewriter.
The question remains: why did CBS choose to ignore the advice of its own analysts who warned them that this was fake?
What is your pathetic obsession with Karl Rove, anyway? Why do you ignore the abundant evidence that the document came from operatives in the Texas Democratic Party?
Does it really matter *who* let the fake-document rat out of the bag?
What a naive world Frank lives in! 😉
Maybe it didn’t take a lot of time to debunk those documents but it takes some time.
The bloggers who all — apparently — are document experts responded instantly. No time at all! Somebody tipped those bloggers off and probably paid them too.
I smell a rat in that one. It seems like a classic Karl “The Rat” Rove stunt to me.
Have you followed Rove’s career? It’s riddled with dirty politics just like this one. This wouldn’t even go down as his best.
“The bloggers who all – apparently – are document experts responded instantly. No time at all! Somebody tipped those bloggers off and probably paid them too.”
Ha!!! I KNEW you were going to say that.
It wasn’t “no time at all” – it was THREE FULL HOURS. The idiots who make this claim say that the report was aired at 8-such and such PM, and the first post on FreeRepublic was just minutes later, at 8-such-and-such-plus-a-few-minutes.
Just one problem with this – the time given for the airing of 60 Minutes II is in EASTERN time, while the FreeRepublic post was listed in PACIFIC time.
Eastern and Pacific time are THREE HOURS APART, moron!
Are you old enough to remember typewriters? While it may take a typography expert to describe the nature of the difference between typewriter type and computer type, it sure as hell doesn’t take an expert to SEE the difference.
So your proof is “it’s dirty politics, therefore it HAD to be Karl Rove!”
You’re a bloomin’ genius, you are.
No, no, no! If it’s Kark Rove, it HAD to be dirty politics. …
Must-read background on http://www.blogforamerica.com/archives/005807.html#872865">the way the WSJ put the hatchet job together from DFA’s Laura Gross, who was interviewed on background and quoted.
Frank,
One sure way to know that someone is out of facts and logic is when they start hurling insults.
Obvious, you know I’m making a point here and you’re at odds to refute it.
I’ll take your word that their was a whopping three hour lag between the story and the response. But this still proves my point!
Three hours to watch the show, launch a document investigation, analyze the document and make conclusive judgment is –EFFECTIVELY — NO TIME AT ALL.
A real normally developing news story would have taken several DAYS for a response and refutation…. NOT THREE HOURS!
These bloggers were tipped off and probably paid. It’s the most logical conclusion.
I smell a RAT — Karl “The Rat” Rove. Karl probably told the bloggers to wait a day or too but they wanted to beat each other. A three hour response is just not credible
“A real normally developing news story would have taken several DAYS for a response and refutation…. NOT THREE HOURS!”
The problem is that you’re still thinking in terms of the way the traditional media works. You can’t seem to comprehend the way that the blogosphere works – at light speed.
“I smell a RAT – Karl ‘The Rat’ Rove.”
Are you saying that Karl Rove is smarter than everyone at CBS who touched the forged document?
Yeah, I think Karl Rove might very well be smarter than the people at CBS!
I think CBS dropped the ball on a valid story and Rove took full advantage of that by tipping off the bloggers and possibly paying them, too. In other words, Rove won.
Rove may be totally amoral but he is smart.
Why do you guys find it so impossible to believe that Rove might pay off some bloggers?
If Dean can do it, Rove — who is surely WAY more politically savvy than Dean — can certainly do it and probably did in the CBS case.
This stinks… and it stinks like Karl Rove. Just like so much other dirty politics these days.