Paid for Blogging
South Dakota bloggers take a hit – and a payoff, by David Crisp
"South Dakota just had its equivalent of the CBS forged documents story, and hardly anyone noticed. Actually, what happened in South Dakota might have been worse. At least there’s a chance that CBS was honestly snookered. But the South Dakota case involved a deliberate breach of public trust, with the express intent of affecting a political race.
"So why the silence? Because the South Dakota case involved not a major news outlet but political blogs, opinionated online personal journals that advocates see as the successor to the hidebound, dinosaur-like mass media that Americans have relied upon for decades.
"Ironically, CBS itself called public attention to the South Dakota case. In a column at cbsnews.com, political writer David Paul Kuhn reported that two popular South Dakota blogs, South Dakota Politics and Daschle v. Thune, were written by paid advisers to John Thune, the Republican who upset Tom Daschle in November for a U.S. Senate seat.
"According to the column, John Lauck of Daschle v. Thune was paid $27,000 by the Thune campaign. Jason Van Beek of South Dakota Politics was paid $8,000. Although both blogs wrote extensively about the race with a pro-Thune stance, neither fully disclosed connections to the campaign."
"The response at South Dakota Politics, which now incorporates both bloggers, was predictably pathetic. Mr. Lauck notes that he was criticizing Sen. Daschle long before he was getting paid by Mr. Thune. And he points out that the conflict had been reported elsewhere, even if not on the blogs.
“Blogs never claimed to be ‘objective’ as CBS did,” Mr. Lauck writes. “Anyway, if one read the blog for more than a post they would know it was pro-Thune.”
"Surprisingly, this theme has been picked up in those sections of the blogosphere where blog triumphalism rules the day. In general, the argument seems to go: Mainstream media (commonly abbreviated to MSM on the web) purport to abide by ethical standards of objectivity and fairness. Since they don’t always meet those standards, mainstream reporters are inevitably corrupt. Bloggers abide only by whatever standards they choose; they are therefore intellectually and ethically pure.
“Undisclosed bias is much, much worse than undisclosed financial support, and only the dinosaurs of the MSM don’t recognize it,” writes Hugh Hewitt on his popular conservative blog.
"This aging Apatosaurus certainly doesn’t recognize it. Money is a cold, hard fact. Biases are slippery and unknowable, poking their heads out of hidden pockets when we least expect it. I have biases I don’t even know about, much less disclose, but I don’t take money from anybody.
"This whole debate is difficult for MSM dinosaurs to bend our minds around. If, for example, I were to accurately report that political reporter Jim Gransbery of The Billings Gazette was on the payroll of a political campaign, the scandal would be huge. He would be fired and probably would never work in this business again. And every single one of his colleagues would think he got exactly what he deserved.
"Now, I know Jim Gransbery. I have worked with him, argued with him, hoisted a few beers with him. I think he is about as likely to take a political payoff as he is to go to work wearing a black cocktail dress with a string of pearls. Both of us were weaned on standards that say you don’t take the money, you don’t justify taking the money, you don’t even think about taking the money. And if you do take the money, you set your notebook aside and go into some other line of work.
"I don’t know Mr. Lauck or Mr. Van Beek. But I have followed their blog and even posted a link to it on my own blog, which has been in deep hibernation since I began teaching in September. I never looked to South Dakota Politics for neutral reporting, but I did go there hoping for intellectual honesty.
"And I went there hoping for evidence of the promise of blogging to provide an alternative to the drab dailies that dominate Western states.
"The South Dakota bloggers not only attacked Sen. Daschle relentlessly, they also went after the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, criticizing its alleged pro-Daschle bias and helping to alter the way it covered the Senate race.
"That’s the power of pamphleteering, now with a worldwide reach thanks to the internet. Montana has no equivalent blog that is so tightly focused on political and media developments. I thought South Dakota Politics was giving me a glimpse of the future.
"And maybe it was. Too bad."
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