« Technorati Tags | Main | Take Back the News! » A "breeze from the west" inspires a tornado or twoZephyr Teachout's zinger about "financially interested blogging" generated a lot of blog over the last few days, and Thursday's clarification didn't resolve ill will generated among those who felt Zephyr's comments were naive or worse. What shook the hive? Mainly this couple of paragraphs: On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.Mathew Gross, who was also part of the Dean campaign, says that Kos and Armstrong were hired as technical consultants, period, and what they blogged was their own business. Was the expectation that they would send positive messages about Dean strictly within Zephyr's head? We may never know. But what troubles me is that Zephyr framed the message to suggest an ethical lapse – by the campaign as well as the bloggers, even though she later posted I actually don't think Kos, or anyone else, took these contracts anything but innocently. Atrios has useful posts about this flap, the latest here and here. Though I hate to prolong the agony by bringing "zephyrgate" up after everybody and his uncle's brother has blogged the story, but it's enough of a bad deal for the Dean coalition that it bears mentioning. Besides, I want someone to add weblogsky to the list of blogs who've posted about this – which you can find at the page for the Berkman Center Conference on Blogging, Journalism & Credibility. (What's life about, if not ATTENTION!?) jon posted this at 9:30 PM |
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