Blogger payola?

Direland reports:

Daily Kos and MyDD, two very popular bloggers, both took $3000 a month from the Howard Dean presidential campaign for four months to promote Dean, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning--citing as one source this post from Zonkette (a.k.a. Zephyr Teachout, former Internet outreach director for the Dean campaign). The WSJ compares this to the Armstrong Williams pay-for-propaganda scandal. I don't believe in bloggers taking payoffs of this kind--so I've removed Daily Kos from my recommended blogs list.

Personally, I don't think a blogger should be held to the standards of a journalist, unless that's what he or she is claiming to be. I don't know whether Kos fits that description, because I don't read his blog. I never had his blog linked on my site, for the same reason I don't link Atrios, even though they are two of the most popular leftist blogs on the internet. The reason is that I think they don't offer anything I can't find in the news, on excellent current event headline collector sites (like Cursor), or on less popular blogs that are often more entertaining and every bit as insightful. Also, many other bloggers read the "big boys", and if there's something I'm not getting elsewhere that is particularly insightful or of interest, somebody else will reference it, and then I'll pick it up.

Also, Atrios tends to spend way too much time on defensive sparring with right-wing bloggers, and I really don't give a crap what they think of each other. He also has a tendency to simply say "look at this", and give "this" a link. You have no idea what he's sending you off to look at. Only that it must be something really important simply because he says it's worth your time. If a blogger wants to take money to promote something, I have no problem with that. But I do have a problem with a blogger who seems to take him/herself to be more important than the material he or she is blogging.

My own standard is that I wouldn't ask for or accept money for blogging news, because I feel very strongly that it should be freely available. The "big boys", however, I think would see what they are doing as getting paid for their opinions. And that's a different story. They have every right to that. Kos being paid to promote Dean is not the same as being paid for his opinion, but he has webspace for advertising, and it's his personal blog. If he's not claiming to be an independent or unbiased journalist, then what's the fuss? He got paid to make campaign promotions.

What I imagine Direland is objecting to is the possibility that by taking big bucks for your opinion, your opinion may not be entirely yours. I don't have a problem with that when we're talking about bloggers, because I'm not looking to a blogger for guidance or truth. Just information. And then it's up to me to verify the accuracy of that information if I'm going to believe it. Maybe I should read Daily Kos and find out what I'm missing. Or at least to remember why I don't read it, because, at a glance, it looks like a decent blog. I have read it in the past, and there must be some reason I don't have it as a recommended blog, or even have it on my long list, but for the life of me, other than what I've already said, I can't recall what that reason is.

I never heard of MyDD until now. Here's that blog's post on the issue. I have to agree with it that this was a right-wing attempt to deflect the Armstrong Williams story. And a pathetic one, at that. But that's politics. An ugly game. If you're going to get into it, you gotta know you're going to get muddy.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.