From a column by Rick Holmes:
Holmes: Who can you trust?
After it was disclosed that cable TV commentator and syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams had taken $241,000 from the Bush Administration to promote the No Child Left Behind Act, Williams had an interesting defense: He didn't know it was wrong, he said, because he had never been a real journalist.
[blah blah blah blah blah]
Finally, there are the bloggers, those increasingly influential commentators who often have nothing behind them but a computer and modem. Far from advertising their credentials, some bloggers don't even reveal their names.
What is their agenda? Who are they working for? What are their standards? More important, who can you trust?
(Rant follows in extended entry)
[...]
Armstrong Williams was dropped by Tribune Media, which distributed his syndicated newspaper column, for taking cash from the Education Department to hype the No Child Left Behind Act. But what standard will keep him off the cable channels?
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that two bloggers had accepted payments from Howard Dean's campaign. One of them, the guy who runs DailyKos, was logging a million readers a month just before the November election. What standards govern blogs? How do we know if they are being paid by a partisan think tank, lobbying group or politician? Who fires a blogger on the take?
The "new media" of cable ranters and Internet bloggers may have no standards governing their professionalism and ethics, but that doesn't stop them from trashing those who do. And while it's good to have watchdogs keeping an eye on big media, between their vigilance, the sins of the press, and the self-serving agendas of some political players, the credibility of major news organizations has plummeted.
(Rick Holmes' column appears on Sunday. He can be reached by e-mail at rholmes@cnc.com.)
The author, who claims to be a journalist, is pretty much dead wrong with his spin and makes no effort to point out exactly what ethics Kos and Jerome DID follow. Ignoring their ethical choices and asking -- as if a great unknowable, unknown -- "what are their ethics?" is the same as accusing them of not having any.
The ethical choices followed by Kos and Jerome are well-documented, and it beyond slimy for the author of this opinion piece to claim otherwise. In the context of the entire post, it basically amounts to a smear job by a "journalist" who will boast about his own profession's ethical standards while failing to follow even the simplest of those. Such as, you know, providing the truth to the public.
Here's the truth, as Holmes should have reported it: Jerome Armstrong's ethical choice was to quit blogging entirely during the period he was paid by the Dean campaign, and Kos chose to post a prominent disclaimer. The fact that Kos was getting a million hits before the November presidential election has, of course, absolutely nothing to do with the Dean campaign, because that related to the Democratic primary. And of course, neither Jerome nor Kos was paid to produce positive blog content.
Oh, and the WSJ didn't "report" a damn bit of news. It was well documented on the Internets and in the news media that these bloggers were hired for their blogging expertise by the Dean campaign. (Not for their blogging, which is a different matter.)
Who can you trust? Apparently NOT Rick Holmes.
Contact addresses:
Rick Holmes, columnist -- rholmes@cnc.com
Letters to the editor -- mdnletters@cnc.com