Blog P.I.

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.