There have been a lot of diaries about the advertising here on DailyKOS. I think it is time to end advertising on DailyKOS.
Kos has a severe conflict of interest between collecting money from lobbyists and, at the same time, advocating for candidates and policy. This is also true of the MSM, and we can show that Fox News and other MSM are influenced by their advertising dollars to promote particular positions. If we want to claim that there is a "Culture of Corruption" in politics we must also examine ourselves and our institutions to be sure that there is no conflict of interest.
A conflict of interest can occur whenever you receive money to promote a particular point of view. Since Kos is an active party staffer who has worked on multiple campaigns, including Howard Dean's Presidential Campaign, he is not just your standard run of the mill journalist. He is an activist with influence on where this party is going and what policies our government will pursue. Since he accepts money from lobbyists to present their viewpoints on his blog it is a clear conflict of interest. I will present more below the fold.
I am going to post a comment that is from a Harvard Law School
discussion about this very issue.
This is a really important discussion. I agree with Jay that trust is important, too -- but I think the ethical questions are currently critical, not for the growth of the medium, but for its worthiness.
Trust and trustworthiness are two separate questions. If I am interested in growing a particular media, I am interested in making people trust it - but not actually in its trustworthiness. For example, you see an extraordinary deep degree of trust in characters on right wing talk radio. I am more interested in crafting a media that is trustworthy.
I think the ethics question is a serious one, which I've brought up elsewhere and fought with Markos Zuniga, and several others in the blogosphere, about. In this past election, at least a few prominent bloggers were paid as consultants by candidates and groups they regularly blogged about.
There is a big difference between bias and direct financial interest in the subject of your blogging. The temptation and culture is ripe for interested blogging, and its already happened a lot in politics - I am sure it happens in other fields as well.
On Dean's campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.
While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime.
This is now getting routine - Simon Rosenberg hired Matt Stoller, presumably not just because he's got good ideas, but because he already has a "commentator," "spokesperson," role within the blogging media. The scale is infinitely smaller, but its odd to live in a world where we don't blink when commentators are hired as spokespeople. Imagine Howard Dean hiring Maureen Dowd!
I've brought this up informally with several bloggers, and while many agree, these are some of the reactions:
(a) The kneejerk libertarian response - I don't want any rules on me. I think this is naïve.
(b) My community will police me. I think this is fairly naïve, too - from what I understand about communities in general, and group dynamics, the tendency to hold ranks and reject critizism of the community at large. Furthermore, while there are some yelpers within the community (read: in the comments), the vast majority of readers don't read the comments, and if the blogger continues to write about someone they are financially interested in, there's nothing stopping him.
(c) I never take clients that I don't otherwise support. I think this statement is probably true - at least for now. (The temptation to make money makes us all great rationalizers.) However, as we all know, its not what you say about what you write about, its what you write about that really matters. There are millions of democratic issues out there - and thousands of candidates. If you are consulting for someone, their issues, and their race, are on your mind - you know more about it, and you're more likely to write about it. As a candidate, you buy the mind-space of a commentator, and therefore the pixels, and therefore the traffic, and therefore the money and support. I was actually going to test this this summer, but I never got around to it and didn't have the money. Kos (I'm sorry to use him as a punching bag, but I happen to know more about his clients and our dispute is already public (he told me to go to hell in the New York Times Magazine ) has said he doesn't care about the Sudan because there's no solution, and he's not going to write about it, or something to that effect. What if we hired him as a consultant to Passion of the Present? If he took the job and got engaged, the bet is that he'd start mentioning it.
Ok, what about solutions?
People have suggested different things, including, as is the wont with this crowd, transparency. That begs the question of what is transparency? Since most readers are sporadic, I think true transparency includes mentioning the financial conflict of interest every time the subject comes up. The conflict is present any time the topic is written about, and I think its one of the better norms of both law and journalism that you never, never don't take the conflict seriously.
I'm not particularly happy with transparency alone, however, because of the framing issues I mention above. I don't trust the framing of anyone who is regularly writing and speaking about people they are taking money from, even if they told me about it regularly. I don't think they have the capacity - its demanding too much of human personality - to step back and say, what are the most important issues in the world? What are the most important races? What are the debates I think our community should commit itself to?
There's no laws on this stuff - all we have is culture. Its early enough in the self-publishing community to work on building a culture where financially interesting blogging is publicly rejected, but right now, the culture is going the other direction.
Here's one place the debate happened:
http://mt.skybuilders.com/...
And here's Kos's thoughts on the topic:
Zephyr can go to hell,'' Moulitsas said at the Democratic convention. `'I'm not about to censor myself on any issue,'' he later wrote on another Web site. `'If I care about something, I'll write about it. It's the essence of blogging. As for the mainstream media, who cares what some joker journalism professor wrote? Just keep blogging, doing your thing, and the blogosphere will continue to do just fine. We should let our accomplishments speak for themselves, and they will.''
I think that Zephyr Teachout hits the nail on the head right there.
Some people will argue that Kos has no say in what ads go on his site. This is not true. If you click on the advertising link at the top of the page you will clearly see that:
"All ads are subject to publisher's approval. If the ad is rejected, your money will be refunded via Paypal."
So this argument is moot.
Some people will argue that Kos needs the money from advertising to pay for his site. That is like saying that Michael Scanlon needed the money he received from Jack Abramoff to pay for his beach houses. Did you realize that a front page ad on DailyKOS will cost you $4,200 for one week? Since there are 9 spots on the site for ads this means that Kos could make upto $1.9 million dollars in advertising a year. I am sure the numbers are smaller then that, but the site is currently booked solid until June 23 for advertising so there has got to be a decent income stream coming in from that.
I'm not against Kos making a living. All of us want to make a living, but since he has clear conflicts of interest he needs to come clean and make a clean break from advertising on his site and rely on income from subscriptions and book revenue or we should all shift our allegiance to some other Blog that operates without these conflicts.
UPDATE: After receiving multiple comments that are calling me a troll and calling me other names (and thank you to the few people that did not call me names!) I think that I have hit a big fat nerve with this one. I just want to say that, yes, I am relatively new to the site. My argument is a valid argument and I think that it is something Kos should think about. He has come under attack on this issue before, and will come under attack again. If he is going to push the "culture of corruption" argument it is all the more important to address this issue.
I am not trying to destroy DailyKOS. I believe that by examining ourselves it will only make us stronger. I think that Kos has made great contributions to the progressive cause and the Democratic Party, but this is obviously hitting a nerve and there is really a lot of namecalling toward me without much reasoned argument.
I thank all of you that took the time to read this diary.