Innocent As A Newborn Babe
Political campaigns and consultants are becoming increasingly skillful at manipulating the mainstream press by planting stories in the blogosphere. Despite this, the mainstream press remains credulous about blogging. During South Dakota's U.S. Senate race between Tom Daschle and John Thune, the Thune campaign put two local political bloggers on its payroll. One got $27,000, the other $8,000. Their anti-Daschle reports trickled up into South Dakota newspapers.
The lesson for a campaign is obvious: Got a story you can't convince a mainstream reporter to run? Leak it anonymously to a blog on your payroll. Then get a local reporter to write a story on the controversial, gossipy, local political blog. Soon everyone in town will be talking about the story you leaked to the blog. Voila! Eventually a mainstream news organization will run a story on the rumor that "everyone is talking about." Or they'll do a "what people are buzzing about on the Internet" piece. And no one will know that the blog post was a paid placement until after the election.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Whew! Excuse me, I have to dry my eyes. That was a good one.
Uh, Chris Suellentrop. I'd like to introduce you to a guy named Matt Drudge? I don't know if anyone's ever mentioned it to you, but Matt's been known to slip an item or two into the mainstream on behalf of Republicans in just the way you outline for almost a decade now. (It's pretty clear that he's slipped in an item or two on behalf of the mainstream media, too, hasn't he, Chris? It makes it so much easier to "report" these delicious gossipy lies once they're "out there.")
He doesn't get paid directly by the Republican national committee or any specific candidate for this so he doesn't have to disclose anything. Instead, Republicans launder great piles of cash through speaking fees and book deals and radio shows and "fellowships" to give them a couple of degreees of separation from Drudge's slime machine. They've been "feeding" stories to the mainstream press through him for almost eight years this way. He invented the practise. I'm very surprised you just noticed. Welcome to the world, little guy.
And here's a news flash for you. In this election they expanded that operation throughout the internets with stories like this:
It was amazing Thursday to watch the documents story go from FreeRepublic.com, a bastion of right-wing lunacy, to Drudge to the mainstream media in less than 12 hours," said Jim Jordan, a strategist for independent Democratic groups opposed to Bush.
"That's not to say the documents didn't deserve examination. But apparently the entire thing was cooked up by a couple of amateurs on Free Republic. The speed with which it moved was breathtaking."
By Friday, articles in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and other news outlets were quoting some analysts raising questions about the CBS documents, and others saying it was impossible to judge the memos' authenticity without seeing the originals.
Yes indeed. It was "cooked up by an amateur" who was later revealed to be involved at very high levels in the GOP legal infrastructure. Let's talk about transparency some more, shall we?
At other times you had that unctuous twit Hugh Hewitt exhorting the same Freepers on his radio show and on his blog to flog the Christmas In Cambodia story --- a flaky wingnut obsession that never really took off, but kept the Swift Boat story in the right wing news way after the credibility of O'Neill and Corsi had been completely destroyed.
The New York Post hired the Powerline guys (and Claremont "fellows") along with Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters to write a smear on Kerry's Vietnam record for the op-ed page at the behst, apparently, of John Podhoretz and Deborah Orin. One does wonder why they didn't want to get their hands dirty with such a story themselves.
There are endless examples of the Republican Noise Machine working in concert with the blogosphere --- how directly is anybody's guess. But, it's clear that they did it and regardless of who signs the checks, the money is coming from the same source. Please spare me the lectures about integrity. On the right side of the aisle there hasn't been any sign of it in eons.
Yet, just last night we saw the perfect examples of two of these upstanding rightwing Scaife/Regnery/Murdoch whore suck-ups looking down their patrician noses at the left bloggers who openly supported Democratic politicians and disclosed that they were consulting for them:
HUGH HEWITT [AUTHOR]: No, Bill. In fact, the idea of payola is very dangerous. Bloggers on the take are very bad for the business of blogging. Blogging of real journalists, and people like Power Line and like InstaPundit and myself, we don't like it when Daily Kos shows up on the take of the Howard Dean campaign. Now Daily Kos says, this is one of the bloggers from the left, says he disclosed it, but not to the satisfaction of anyone who watches him. I didn't know.
O'REILLY: Aw, this is bunk. This is bull. Nobody knew about this.
HEWITT: That's right.
What a fetid, pietistic pile of nonsense.
The only effect of this controversy is to make it impossible for Democratic bloggers to make money writing about politics unless they are employed by one of the three or four liberal magazines.
The major right wing bloggers, meanwhile, will always be well compensated for backing Republican politicians, never worry. They have an entire institutional machine set up to do just that. Kos and other entrepreneurial activist Dems, on the other hand, will be be emasculated with cramped rules and codes and a requirement for purity (as opposed to transparency) while the other side continues to stealthily professionalize their online operation and use it to dominate the discourse.
Suellentrop's take on this shows once again that just as the Right Wing Noise Machine is the Democrats' enemy, the SCLM is our enemy too. Indeed, they are mutually dependent. They play ball to get their stories and their gossip and their access (and their promotions from their Republican bosses.) They are not looking out for our best interests and we should not get defensive about our honesty or our integrity. After all, look at how well they've protected the political system from being polluted with years and years of Republican lies and propaganda.
It just makes me laugh to see them get high and mighty about the blogosphere being shills for politicans. At least we aren't willing, credulous tools who play court jester for the Republicans as they insult and berate us for doing exactly what they want us to do. That would be something to be ashamed of.
Update to the post below:
I've received about 30 pieces of e-mail on this subject from dean supporters who think that I'm playing into the right wing's hands for taking Zephyr Teachout's word that they hired Jerome and Kos in the hope that they'd stay on the team. I didn't realize that Teachout had been consigned to the ninth circle of hell long before this and that her characterization of what happened simply doesn't square with any reality as we know it. I take it all back, I didn't know what I was talking about. I'm an idiot. I wish I hadn't written about the implications within the Dean campaign at all because it obscured the real point I wanted to make about this little tempest. It never pays to get Dean supporters upset unless you have a really good reason.
I don't want to make more out of this than necessary, but with the "blogging and ethics" conference in which they invited no partisan lefty bloggers (unless Teachout was suposed to fill that role, god help us), the handwringing in the press and the phony sanctimony I'm seeing on the right, I think this actually adds up to more than just a convenient equivalence argument for the Williams payola scandal. I think that at a time when Democratic politicians are just becoming cognisant of the power of the internet (beyond fundraising) this trumped up controversy about "blogger ethics" could set us back quite seriously.
Update II: Crooks and Liars has the video of the High Priest of Blogging and his little dog Bill slandering Kos last night. (Scroll down.)