National Journal’s K. Daniel Glover, who never gets too old for this, co-wrote an op-ed for the New York Times today on bloggers who work for campaigns (based on his own reporting, which I later extrapolated into an unwieldy series of charts), and the reaction from the blogosphere could probably be best described as extreme hostility.
On first read, I didn’t quite see what the problem was, but after reading through all the posts available at Memeorandum, I can see what they’re getting at — though the reaction is, to no great surprise, overly negative. The most controversial passage seems to be this one:
Few of these bloggers shut down their “independent” sites after signing on with campaigns, and while most disclosed their campaign ties on their blogs, some — like Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits — did so only after being criticized by fellow bloggers.
Among the fiercest detractors are friends of bloggers who worked for campaigns and who did cease their independent blogging, but are not exempted from the mild criticism offered in the story. A good example is Amanda Marcotte, who took over Pandagon from Jesse Taylor when he signed up with Gov.-elect Ted Strickland:
Daniel Glover and Mike Essl are hinting around that a lot of bloggers have undisclosed conflicts of interest and forget to include an extremely important disclaimer about some of the bloggers on their handy little chart here. You know, the part where they clearly state that bloggers like Peter Daou and our own Jesse Taylor have no conflict of interest at all. Because they quit their blogs before starting their campaign jobs so there was no conflict of interest.
Here’s Scott Shields, in the comments at MyDD:
It’s pretty clear … that I was on payroll with the Menendez campaign. I haven’t looked at all of the other examples, but I’d be willing to bet that it was pretty much the same story all around — that full disclosure was offered. What, I wonder, is Glover’s point? That bloggers are “for sale”? … I consider myself an activist first and an ideologically-driven citizen journalist second. That’s just how I’ve defined my role. It’s something I think I’ve been pretty clear about. If I believe in a candidate, I’m willing to work for that candidate. If I don’t, then I’d take a pass. At no point would I ever fail to disclose my work for that candidate. [Note: The original quote here was Jonathan Singer's which is quoted below. This has been replaced with a quote from Shields' comment. My apologies to both.]
Conservatives who weighed in had a similar reaction, though they took it less personally. Alabama Liberation Front responded with snark:
I can be bought. I just want to make that clear. If everybody else is going to discard their bloggerly principles and go a-whorin’ after political money, I don’t want to be the last blogger virgin, sitting around drinking lemonade and waiting for the phone to ring.
And a contributor to Done With Mirrors was skeptical about the apparent premise of the op-ed:
Of course I would have a problem with a politician directly paying a journalist employed as such, disclosed or not. (I don’t want politicians paying off staff writers for major newspapers, for example.) But what these bloggers are being paid for isn’t journalism, not in my book. It isn’t even “citizenjournalism,” about which term and which concept, as they are used in the blogosphere generally, I harbor deep skepticism.
All together now: Tough crowd.
The only blogger explicitly criticized is Hynes, a Republican, yet most of the outcry comes from the left. Why? Guilt by association. That’s why I think that the article might not have received such harsh criticism had it not been paired with a chart placing bloggers’ quotes about their employers next to information about what they were paid.
But the chart was a production of the New York Times, with the numbers borrowed from Glover’s original piece and the quotes attributed to each blogger taken from… well, it doesn’t say. The chart seems to imply that there’s something shocking about the fact that a blogger paid to work for a campaign would have positive things to say about their candidate. But do these quotes come from the bloggers’ personal websites? From the official campaign blogs? Were they written before or after being hired? These are important things to know before passing judgment on the propriety of the statements quoted — but the insinuation that these comments are insincere is highly misleading.
Should Glover have refused the op-ed on this basis? Maybe, but I am quite sure I would not have. Perhaps another sentence or two noting a few of the subtleties that the bloggers are pointing out now might have quelled some of the outrage — but then again, perhaps not. Take for instance the ever-subtle Atrios, who carps:
I guess the blogger ethics standard is now if you’ve ever run a blog there’s something unseemly about actually working with politicains [sic], even years later.
No, that’s not what the article says. Not even close. Atrios’ response manages to be even more overbroad than the article quoted. I respect and like Jonathan Singer, who wrote the main response at MyDD today, but he too goes overboard (albeit with more wit and humor):
While Glover does note that some of “these bloggers shut down their ‘independent’ sites after signing on with campaigns” or that “most disclosed their campaign ties on their blogs”, he fails to mention the fact that a number of the bloggers, like Jerome, largely recused themselves of writing during the course of their employment, farming out writing responsibilities to other bloggers like Chris, Matt and myself.
The reason why may shock you: Chris, Matt and Jonathan do not exist, despite any previous claims. He got me. We’re all the same person. I (Jerome) have been writing under these aliases the entire time I have been working on other campaigns. I also used to write under the name of Scott Shields until I got hired under that pseudonym by another campaign. Thought you met Matt, Chris or Jonathan at Yearly Kos or some other event? Most likely you met one of the young fellows I paid to play those roles. They’re just out of work, dime a dozen actors from Los Angeles. Anyone could have played them.
At the very least, this mini-kerfuffle highlights just how difficult it can be to generalize about the blogosphere within the constraints of the short op-ed format. And I should know — earlier in the year I wrote a newspaper op-ed (though for the Washington Examiner, nothing like the New York Times) and I was roundly trashed by some of the same bloggers — although I am envious of “Roger Ailes”‘ “K. Douchebag Glover” nickname; I got nothing quite so clever.
So I can certainly sympathize. Looking back on my piece (which unfortunately is no longer online), I got some things right and some things wrong. But if I could have linked to blog posts backing up my arguments, it would have been less controversial. I would imagine the same is true here. Glover’s experience today certainly reconfirms my conclusion that newspaper op-ed columns, with their limited space and lack of hypertext, are almost invariably a terrible place to comment on the blogosphere.
This seems to be what Glover implies in a comment posted at his own blog, in response to an angry reader:
The Times wanted me to focus on people who had their own blogs and then went to work for campaigns. My original piece also included people who were paid to blog for campaigns or advise them on Internet strategy but who weren’t independent bloggers beforehand. …
Furthermore, my article neither states nor implies that anyone, candidates or bloggers, is “corrupt” because of ties between the two. I don’t believe that. Candidates have the right to pay for Internet advice, blogging, etc., and bloggers have a right to be paid for that work — or to do it on a volunteer basis, if they so choose.
I get that. But that wasn’t in the article. And with bloggers on a hair-trigger response to any criticism whatsoever, the NYT piece should have said exactly that. Glover and Essl didn’t say (or mean) what many bloggers believe they said — but they didn’t not say it, either.
P.S. Don’t miss the comments, where Danny Glover adds a bit more detail about how the article came together — and adds the important fact (you would think) that Essl’s contribution was limited to designing the chart itself.
A friend has tipped me to a controversy in the baseball blogosphere — it goes strong even in the offseason — between long-lasting (or maybe just lasting-long) Philadelphia Daily News sports columnist Bill Conlin and the blogger at Phillies-focused Crashburn Alley. Philadelphia magazine’s Daily Examiner blog explains:
Illegal immigrant ice cream vendors might be spreading leprosy in Manassas. Prince William County has been infiltrated by “unassimilated marxist radicals.” Manassas Park police covered up the predations of five Hispanic men who gang-raped a woman in the street in June.
In the angry life of Maryscott O’Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her president is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O’Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.
Who Was the First White House Blogger?
You know that HBO special where actor Robert Wuhl knocks down popular misconceptions about American history in a classroom setting? Well, that’s what we’re doing here, because of an assertion contained in this morning’s techPresdent Daily Digest. All right, hit the lights:
That’s enough, turn them back on.
I’m not surprised tP’s Micah Sifry believes that Graff was the first blogger credentialed to attend briefings at the White House. After all, Graff announced at the time that he’d been approved, got leading lights of the political and tech blogospheres to help write the legend, and subsequently proclaimed himself a figure of historical interest. Today, it’s the first thing he mentions in his speakers bureau listing.
It’s a good line. I can see why he ran with it.
The problem is, Graff was not the first accredited blogger at the White House. I know this because the real first blogger is my good friend and former colleague Eric Pfeiffer, then employed as a blogger by National Review Online. Pfeiffer sought and obtained credentials to cover the White House press briefings, and on March 1 he covered that morning’s gaggle with Scott McClellan in a post appropriately titled “Notes from the Gaggle.” Graff’s credentials weren’t approved until three days later.
This isn’t the first time I’ve brought this up — in fact, at the time I pointed it out to WashingtonPost.com’s Dan Froomkin, who followed up in a column some weeks later:
That’s true enough — squeaky wheels get the grease, and self-promoters get the column inches. Yet others called foul at the time, arguing that professional status and a corporate-designed website disqualified one from being “a blogger”:
Froomkin also tried to draw a distinction between Pfeiffer working for a magazine vs. Graff working for a media site. I’m not sure I go in for these careful distinctions. They did the same kind of work for websites more alike than different, neither of which allowed for comments. So it makes for an interesting debate, but not too interesting, because that “credentialed” condition actually matters — neither were the first to report from the White House in blog format.
That distinction goes to non-journalist and non-Washingtonian Rex Hammock, a veteran of the technology and business blogosphere, who wrote about a private meeting with President Bush in February 2004 — more than a year before Pfeiffer (and was also covered by Froomkin). He wasn’t credentialed, but obviously some would say that qualifies him all the more.
I have no illusions that this post will retire the myth of Garrett Graff as the first blogger credentialed to the White House; it’s been repeated too many times in too many outlets in the past two years. I don’t know him personally and don’t wish him a lot of trouble over this. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s fair to keep crediting him with a milestone he didn’t reach first.