The Wall Street Journal reports the Howard Dean campaign paid two bloggers to hype their campaign — but when you read this report it’s clear that compared to the conservative commentator who took money from the Bush administration to hype its programs this is a case of apples and oranges.
Why? Because the Journal report — which truly seems framed to draw as close a parallel as possible to the Armstrong Williams scandal — has a crucial fact further down in the story: the two bloggers DISCLOSED their consultant work. That is a NOT parallel to what Williams did.
But you don’t know that from the lead of this story — which seems as if it’s published to give the tiny number of Williams apologists some debating points to defend Armstrong’s getting $250,000 from the Bush administration and not revealing a thing about that until USA Today disclosed it.
Also, the top of this story’s summary is greatly weakened when you read the details. Clearly, NOT the same kind of case — and no one of either party should let Armstrong’s few defenders allege it is…certainly not by pointing to this Journal piece.
Here’s how the story begins:
Howard Dean’s presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor’s campaign in their online journals, according to a former high-profile Dean aide.
Zephyr Teachout, the former head of Internet outreach for Mr. Dean’s campaign, made the disclosure earlier this week in her own Web log, Zonkette. She said "to be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment — but it was very clearly, internally, our goal." The hiring of the consultants was noted in several publications at the time.
Six paragraphs down you get this:
The partisan Democratic political bloggers who were hired by the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos. DailyKos is the ninth most linked blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a measurement service, and in October, at the height of the presidential campaign, it received as many as one million daily visits.
Then it gives you these paragraphs which undermine the lead (paragraphs 7, 8 and 9):
The two men, who jointly operated a small political consulting firm, said they didn’t believe the Dean campaign had been trying to buy their influence. Both men noted that they had promoted Mr. Dean’s campaign long before they were hired and continued to do so after their contract with the campaign ended.
Mr. Zuniga said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Dean said the two bloggers hired by the campaign did nothing unethical because both disclosed their connection to the Dean operation.
Indeed, there are three strands in the Armstrong case:
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Taking money from an entity to promote its views.
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Not revealing the arrangement. This was money given by the administration clearly with a tacit understanding that it would never be known to Armstrong’s audience. That would undermine getting the message across via ideas and administration bigwigs on his programs hyping their policies. The only reason Armstrong’s arrangement came to light was due to USA Today’s story.
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The impact of Armstrong’s action on serious minority journalists of all political persuasions.
UPDATE: Michele Malkin agrees with our view on this — that the what the Journal writes about this is NOT the same kind of case. She also has an an excellent update on Armstrong’s latest comments — including calling him calling the ethical firestorm swirling around him a "witchhunt." So now he considers himself a victim. And this administration talks about caring about "character?"
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.