Dan Kennedy snarks thusly about BeatThePressGate:
The bloggers seem to be notably unflustered about Carroll’s larger point, which is that some of them (not BMG) are on the take from political campaigns, and some of them don’t bother to disclose that.
Hey now … I’m getting there, Dan. Just getting warmed up here.
Carroll relied heavily on a New York Times article about payments to bloggers. Actually, Carroll relied not so much on the article itself, but on a chart that detailed names, payments, and bloggers. The article had this harsh little commentary:
Few of these bloggers shut down their “independent” sites after signing on with campaigns, and while most disclosed their campaign ties on their blogs, some – like Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits – did so only after being criticized by fellow bloggers.
Hrm… OK, NYT, you found one, and that’s certainly not good. And the criticism (i.e. accountability) from fellow bloggers is duly noted. Thanks for that. Why isn’t the headline “Bloggers Hold Each Other Accountable”?
But this is the kicker: The chart doesn’t say which of the bloggers disclosed and which did not. It sloppily lumps responsible bloggers who are conscious of their obligation to disclose conflict of interest with those who do not. What the hell kind of responsible journalism is that?
So Dan (or John Carroll, or K. Daniel Glover), you tell me: Which of the listed bloggers disclosed or went on hiatus, and who didn’t? Here, I’ll get you started: Here’s Jerome Armstrong’s disclosure that he was working for Mark Warner, August 20, 2005. What about Pandagon’s Jesse Taylor? Oops — he transferred ownership of his blog to Amanda Marcotte. For more, follow the links from this post. UPDATE: Aldon Hynes holds forth on his role in the Lamont campaign.
Carroll’s piece then goes this bit of sloppiness one step further, by strongly implying that none of the listed bloggers disclosed their work or went on hiatus from their blogs while doing campaign work.
Look, with all due respect, I think all y’all in the traditional media can put down the sanctimony right about now. Getting the story right requires an open mind, a little humility, and yeah, some accountability. You can’t just make up a narrative and bend the facts to fit it. The New York Times (through Mr. Glover) and Greater Boston both blew it.
UPDATE: No, I’m not finished yet. Digby says it better than I could (or just about anyone else, as usual):
Throughout the segment and the roundtable, Carroll insisted that liberal blogs were offenders in this unethical non-disclosure, when in fact, the liberal bloggers were not implicated by non-disclosure at all in the New York Times piece. He got it completely backwards. The scenario in which bloggers are paid to secretly shill for a candidate on their own site happened one time that I’m aware of (aside from Hynes) and it was the notorious conservative Thune bloggers in South Dakota. I suppose it may have happened on the liberal side in this last election, but if it did, it was not revealed by that NY Times article or anywhere else. The dark speculation about the “kept” bloggers of the “left-wing’s glamour web-sites” simply has no basis.
The Ankle Biting Pundit is a conservative. AFIK, I don’t think anyone from our side has hidden a relationship.
if the only reason Glover included a fellow conservative on the list at all was to have the requisite bad example with which to tar all bloggers, especially those dern Democrats. Guilt by association and bad logic; thank you, New York Times.
And I confess all my wrongdoings and conflicts of interest. I’m not proud of what I did, but I hope my readers will somehow be able to forgive me.
The larger issue concerns supposedly independent bloggers being on campaign payrolls. Disclosing that fact doesn’t erase the conflict IMHO. Why have a different standard for the blogosphere and the MSM? No reporter or columnist in the MSM would be allowed to accept money from a campaign, even if he or she disclosed that (especially if he or she disclosed it). Why should it be okay for bloggers to do that? The fact that you (BMG editors) note that you haven’t accepted any money from campaigns shows me that you realize it’s not acceptable to do so.
I agree it’s not ideal even to fully disclose a financial relationship and to keep blogging on a candidate on your own site. Taking a job to blog for a candidate on the candidate’s site? Hey, why not? Is the blogger’s cred as an “independent voice” thereby diminished? Of course! But at least that’s totally transparent to everyone.
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BTW, I might point out that folks in the mainstream media move between political work and media work all the time, and have for ages:
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That’s just who I can immediately think of. I’m sure there are many, many more examples.
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BTW Dave — How can you assume that we realize that — we haven’t even been offered any money. Hah. (Note to the media: That is sarcasm. No, we wouldn’t take money to blog for a candidate on this site.)
Suppose a blogger is ask to sign a confidentiality agreement, the contents of which proscribe certain things about which, he may not blog.
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Should he disclose the items about which he can’t blog?
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Hypothetically speaking, of course.
Gary, we have conversations with people “off the record” all the time. I wouldn’t publicize emails with folks, for instance, unless I had explicitly told them they were “on the record”.
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Yeah, a confidentiality agreement seems pretty lawyerly and restrictive to me, but I understand the gist: You want the working groups to get information, make recommendations, and leave it at that — not blabbing or gossiping about people or processes.
But I think the so-called “revolving door” for pundits in the MSM between their media jobs and politics has mostly been a one-way door. In other words, once they leave their media jobs to work on campaigns or in administrations, they rarely return to the media. Even so, they’ve been roundly and justly criticized for going from one side to the other. (Eric Alterman’s “Sound & Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politcs” offers a good account of the revolving-door situation.)
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Still, Richard Chacon, George Stephanopoulos and others don’t do both at the same time. Chacon isn’t continuing to work at The Globe now that he’s Patrick’s communications director. The fact that a blogger on a campaign payroll doesn’t blog on his or her own site but only on the candidate’s site is a distinction without a difference to me. I have faith that you guys aren’t taking money from political campaigns to blog either on BMG or on any other sites.
Most (but not all) US print media presents itself as “objective”, and part of that objectivity is not taking money from the actors they write about (except for advertising, which is a well understood exception, but still leads to problems). Personally, I think that while this sort of “objectivity” has its place, we’re ill-served by having it be the overwhelmingly dominant form of journalism. It is a structural bias and it affects how news is reported.
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Most blogs to not purport to subscribe to this form of “objectivity”, however. So arguing that since it wouldn’t be right for a newspaper reporter to also work for a candidate, that means it wouldn’t be right for a blogger to do so, misses the mark. You’re trying to judge the blog by the standards the newspaper sets for itself.
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Advocacy has its place too, both in blogs and in older forms of press. It’s unfortunate that the print press has so little room these days for open, forthright advocacy. It’s nice that blogs fill in and supply it.
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I think newspapers some of whose reporters have other jobs (for campaigns, for the city, for a community service group, for a local business – anything the paper might cover) could do a pretty good job. They’d be different from the sorts of papers that don’t allow that, sure, but they’d still be useful. The important thing is that we the readers know about it.
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For example, I find it extremely useful to know that the Washington Times is owned by the Moonies, whenever someone refers to a washtimes article or posts a link. I find that knowledge makes the articles I see there more useful than they would otherwise be. But I fear that for most readers, who don’t know that, the lack of knowledge renders the information not only less useful, but sometimes anti-useful. Newspapers aren’t immune from this sort of problem, but the cult of objectivity that insists they must all be part of it gets in the way of a culture of disclosure that would make people more aware of where sources are coming from.
but it seems to me the standards should be the same for the pundits in each camp. I’m not talking about those who simply post diaries or comments on major blogsites like this one, but the editors who run those sites and use them shape public opinion. It would disappoint me if I were to learn that David or Charlie etc. were working on the side for campaigns. And I think they recognize that too since they don’t do so.
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Thankfully, most daily newspapers aren’t like The Washington Times. The financial and ideological interests of the ownership of a newspaper clearly affect the coverage. I think the ownership interest of The NY Times in the Red Sox has greatly affected the Globe’s coverage of the team, for instance.
There should be room for journalistic outlets that push specific political lines (Fox News followed Murdoch’s support for an invasion of Iraq, for example, not to mention Bush), and for those that seek to insulate themselves (for example Harper’s, which is owned by a foundation) or the Nation, which is controlled to an important degree by the people who make up its annual deficit (it has never turned a profit). Journalists, or bloggers, can run for office, or work for the government, continue to write after they win, and do whatever they want later on. No hard rules like: you can do this, you can’t do that. But, consumers should know what they are getting. Note the practical consequences, incidentally, of trying to hide conflicts: lessened credibility when disclosure comes, as it almost always does.
No, that doesn’t follow at all. David and Charlie present themselves as bloggers who are not being paid by any of the campaigns they write about. So, sure, it would be “disappointing” at least if we found out that wasn’t true. That doesn’t, in and of itself, tell us whether a) they think they should never do that, or b) they think it’s inherently wrong (which is a different question from whether they would do it).
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You write “it seems to me the standards should be the same for the pundits in each camp,” but don’t support that. Not only that, but you conflate making standards “the same” with a specific set of standards; not just saying bloggers & print/TV pundits should have the same standards, but implying they should be these standards: among them, that you should work for a campaign and write about it / talk about it somewhere else in public. Leaving aside the question of whether anyone actually believes in that standard, why do you think it’s such a great idea? I think it’s a horrible one.
but charlie, how can you blame John Carroll for not knowing that. he is a journalist, and he merely repeated the innuendos and rumors he heard as The Wisdom Received. how could you expect him to do any better? it’s so easy to make mistakes when you never check your stories and use rumors and vaguely held notions as bona fide facts. give him a break.
Yeah, he’s not a blogger, so there’s no expectation that he’ll check his facts before publishing them. He’s just a journalist. You know how TV news is. They say stuff they think, and then you have to verify it on your own.
An msm editor takes on this issue in an editorial in today’s [ metrowest daily news http://www.metrowest… ]:
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Editorial: Disclosure is not enough
Wednesday, December 13, 2006 – Updated: 00:35 AM EST
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The blogosphere is always abuzz, but rarely as feverishly as when its virtue is challenged. This week, some liberal bloggers are upset over a New York Times oped piece and WGBH panel discussion on the practice of bloggers taking money from the political candidates they promote.
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The Times’ oped chart showed a list of liberal bloggers who had been paid – anywhere from $850 a month to more than $100,000 in one case – by campaigns, along with a selection of quotes from each blogger about the candidate writing the checks.
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Last Friday, WGBH’s “Greater Boston” tackled the issue with a report and a panel discussion. Unfortunately, reporter John Carroll’s report included a mistake – he took seriously a satirical blog-post alleging one of the bloggers in question wrote under assumed names. This mistake, later corrected by WGBH on its own blog, gave bloggers a stick with which to beat Carroll, while largely ignoring the issue of blogging for hire.
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That’s unfortunate, because the anonymity and wide-open nature of the Internet invites conflicts of interest and reader manipulation. It isn’t just political candidates who are hiring bloggers. Corporations are paying bloggers to write favorably about books, records, movies and consumer products. They pay people to “seed” blog comment sections with praise for whatever they are selling.
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Blogger ethics'' isn't the oxymoron it would seem. Cyberjournalist.net has drafted aBloggers’s code of ethics” that includes the admonition that bloggers “should disclose conflicts of interest, affiliations, associations and personal agendas.” Political bloggers often argue that taking payments from candidates they favor is fine, as long as they are disclosed.<
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But disclosure is a pretty low standard. Just because a prostitute advertises her profession on her business card doesn’t make her any less a whore. She’s still selling her favors and a writer on the payroll of a political campaign is selling his or her opinions.
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Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media – and the bloggers say plenty, often with undisguised contempt – the ethics that govern journalism are well established. Here’s a simple one that applies to the full-time journalists who contribute to these pages: We don’t take money from people we write about. Bloggers who value their credibility should take the same pledge.
Let’s see. On the good side, the editorial comes out and says the New York Times was targeting liberal bloggers, and comes out against the “seeding” phenomenon.
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On the bad side, there’s the repeated sloppiness in assuming the Times was right and that the “assumed names” matter was the only thing Carroll and the others got wrong. Nowhere is there an acknowledgement that liberal blogs, at least, police their own. There’s also the conflation of bloggers on their own blogs and bloggers on a politician’s blog: if the former is paid to puff up the politician without prominent disclosure, that’s bad; I would certainly hope the latter is being paid to run an important component of the campaign, and says good things about the candidate while doing so. It would have been helpful in the blogger/journalist comparison to contrast how the bloggers go between the paid and unpaid side of the streets with how journalists go to work for candidates and after a couple of years leave to return to journalism.
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My question to the paper: do your part-timers ever take money from people they write about? If so, better get that disclosure pen ready, because 40-hour-a-week journalists look the same as 10-hour-a-week journalists in black and white. More important, at what point does that acceptance of money expire, so that the journalist is considered free of a conflict of interest on the subject? And when moving from journalism to industry or politics, should any recent stories be viewed with suspicion if favorable to one side or another? How far in the past is “safe”?
I left out oped contributors to save space. I don’t pay oped contributors much, and they are paid by the column, not by the hour. My policy is if someone else is paying you to write it, I won’t pay you again. I’ll run columns by someone working for a non-profit dealing with an issue he or she knows well, but I won’t pay for it, and the affiliation is disclosed. I don’t pay politicians who submit opeds, figuring the taxpayers are already paying them to be advocates. More than a decade ago, we had a regular columnist who also did campaign work. He wrote a flattering piece about a client, and when we found out about the relationship, we fired the columnist.
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I don’t distinguish between liberal and conservative bloggers when it comes either to ethical standards or “policing our own.” For that matter, bloggers has become almost too broad a category to talk about meaningfully, what with all the knitting blogs, sex blogs, corporate blogs, personal diary blogs, etc. I can’t propose a code of ethics that applies to all of them. But I think readers should expect that any political blogger who is awarded the equivalent of journalist credentials at a political convention should care enough about being seen as credible and independent to refuse money from politicians he’s covering.
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So what if a blog “ran” (frontpaged?) a post by someone working for an advocacy group (non-profit or otherwise), about an issue they advocate for? I don’t know of any major political blogs that pay for posts, so assume the writer of the post doesn’t get paid for it, and of course we all agree the relationship is disclosed.
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On the one hand, how is that different from what you just said you would do?
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On the other hand, how is that different from running a post from a candidate or campaign staffer? (who does not get paid for the post, and whose role is clearly identified)
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…
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And if you’re one of those aliens we keep discussing and have a third hand do spare, how is that different from Waiter writing about the food service professions while working as a waiter at a restaurant, or Hugo Schwyzer writing about feminism and womens’ issues while being paid to teach womens’ studies at a university, or Juan Cole blogging about the Middle East while being paid to teach that at a university, or barmaid blogging about bartending while employed at a bar, or Bruce Schneier writing about security while owning his own security company (which just got bought), … ?
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How do you even decide which of these are “political”? They all touch on politics occasionally to varying extents. It’s easy to label Waiter Rant as “not political”, and Juan Cole as “political”, but what about Hugo Schwyzer or Bruce Schneier? Tricky.
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None of these are pretending to be objective newspapers, of course. If your point is merely that most political blogs are not the same thing as newspapers, sure, that’s true, and I’m glad of it. Blogs do have more in common with Op-Ed sections of newspapers, but once you’re just looking at op-ed, it becomes much harder to see the supposed ethical line that separates what blogs do from what op-ed pages do such that op-ed is somehow on higher moral ground.
(1) Basic point about disclosure. They are quite right. Bloggers should disclose, just like everyone else.
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(2) Ludicrous, amazing, hypocrisy. This is what is getting people so steamed up. “We don’t take money from people we write about.” Please. A screen shot of this very editorial shows that is contains an advertisement paid for by the government that pimps an event with Deval Patrick and Marty Meehan. Don’t they write about them?! To pretend that journalists are unaffected by advertisers, circulation figures, sources that feed them hot stories, etc. is ridiculous. Of course they take money from people they write about, they just do it in public, which is fine, or at least is the system in this country. My advice to MetroWest: hire whomever you want as a reporter, even Deval Patrick’s Press Secretary, but disclose their day job. Your customers will decide what they think of your coverage.
There’s a difference between advertising and cash delivered to the pocket of a writer. The company will sell advertising to anyone, and there’s a long-established wall between the newsroom and the ad department. Editors don’t sell ads or even talk to advertisers (the exception being politicians, and if they even imply a relationship between their ads and our endorsement, we correct them with the strongest possible language). I had no idea that political ad would appear on the screen shot and I don’t like it a bit. But you can bet the advertiser had no idea what I would write that would appear below it, and certainly no control over it. I would hope honest, independent bloggers would be interested in building whatever institutional barriers would protect them from the appearance of corruption, and I’d be surprised if you BMG guys really believe that disclosure forgives any sin.
Rick, I’m sorry but like John Carroll, you’re throwing a whole bunch of issues into the stew that have nothing to do with the actual NYT article; and you’re implying that there’s disagreement where actually we do agree.
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Anonymous, paid “seeding” is bad and dishonest. We agree on that. Which of the NYT-listed bloggers were accused of that? If the answer is “none”, why would you bring it up at all? Seems like a red herring to me.
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You’re right, disclosure is a low standard. And of course it lowers a bloggers “cred” as an independent voice — how could it not? I think and hope that most bloggers (and their readers) understand that trade-off.
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But I will say that in my experience, if the full disclosure is pervasive on the site and persistent, I’ve had absolutely no trouble appropriately discounting the weight of what they write. For instance, our own Cos blogged professionally for John Bonifaz, and I read everything he wrote through that lens. He still had interesting things to say, but you knew where it was coming from.
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More to the point: Blogging is not journalism. It’s citizenship. You still have to be honest, fair, and decent, as in everything in life. But there’s a big difference. Citizenship is not impartial or objective: Citizenship is values-based, subjective, gets involved and takes sides. And indeed, blogging-as-citizenship depends intensively on a strong, ethical, skeptical media — of which the Greater Boston piece was none.