Much Ado About Zippo

I can remember seeing the "Disclaimer: I do some technical work for the Dean campaign" line at the top of the Daily Kos site for nearly six months. In fact, the "breaking story" that the Dean campaign was paying Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD for technical advice was common knowledge as much as a year ago. Somehow, the Wall Street Journal and others have turned this into quelle scandal, perhaps to deflect coverage of the ongoing Armstrong Williams investigation.

Bloggers are more avowedly partisan than journalists. Blogs are more akin to 18th-century pamphlets (would you believe there was never a scandal that Tom Paine was being paid to print his tracts in favor of American independence... oh, wait, he was). In this case, Zephyr Teachout and the Dean campaign sought out Kos and Jerome, both already out as supporters, to (in her words) get them to write about the candidate. As if two Dean supporters wouldn't blog about the candidate during the primary election season. And considering Jerome then quit blogging immediately upon being hired, I'd say that didn't work out too well.

"Technical consultation" I take to mean advice on how to use the netroots to enhance the Dean campaign. Which, according to most people involved (except for Zephyr, who was in a very public fight with Kos prior to this), is exactly what happened.

How this has anything to do with the Department of Education breaking the law by sending taxpayer dollars to a columnist to shill for their policy is beyond me.

There's an ethical discussion about this on Instapundit. I've never been paid to blog (that goes without saying, although I sometimes blog more than I do the job for which I am paid), and if I was, I would disclose it. The naked partisanship of the blogosphere kind of blurs the line about bias, if you ask me. Certainly a report with the patina of nonpartisan news that is eventually revealed as partisan is out of bounds. Like the Administration video news releases on Medicare and ONDCP, for example, or (to some) RatherGate.

I would not sign a blogger code of ethics, however, this is something that should be done on a blogger-by-blogger, case-by-case basis.