My View From Inside the Great Kos-Dean Konspiracy
Fri Jan 14, 2005 at 11:15:20 PM PDT
Update [2005-1-15 2:15:20 by Armando]: From the diaries, by Armando.
There's plenty of strurm and drang in blogdom tonight concerning the non-story on Markos' role (and that of Jerome Armstrong) with the Dean campaign, specifically insinuations that Markos used Daily Kos to advance Howard Dean's campaign because of secret payments to him from the Dean campaign. I'll leave Markos to deal with the main issues of the non-story. I do, however, want to contribute a few small but relevant details that may help in assessing the credibility of the story being spun by Zephyr Teachout and pushed by the WSJ and the right wing in their pathetic attempt to find something equivalent to the Bush Administration stealing $240,000 of our tax dollars and giving it to Armstrong Williams for touting Bush administration policies.
In the Summer of 2003, long after Markos had posted the disclaimer that he was doing contract work for the Dean campaign at the top of Daily Kos, he offered me and Meteor Blades the opportunity to be guest bloggers for him on weekends, when he traveled, and during the time immediately following the birth of his son, which was expected a few months later. When he contacted me about my interest and availability, he told me what the expectations were regarding when and how often to post, the importance of monitoring the site, alerting him to trolls, etc. He went over the technical aspects, and he had me and Meteor Blades share contact info so we could coordinate with each other to prevent us both posting the same stories and making sure there weren't gaps in posting.
[There's more below the jump]
What Markos did
not do, however, is ask me or Meteor Blades who we supported for the nomination. In fact, I don't think Meteor Blades ever posted a single piece on the primary race, and I'm pretty sure his first significant comment about whether he did or would have supported Howard Dean was
this, posted below a post-mortem I wrote a month after Dean ended his campaign. I think I only did two posts about the Democratic primaries prior to mid-February when it became obvious that Kerry had locked up the nomination; one on Joementum's haplessness and one on Kerry opting out of public financing.
Why do I bring up this information? To point out that the idea that Markos was somehow shilling for Dean at every opportunity is ludicrous. If he was so concerned with deceptively promoting Dean at Daily Kos, he obviously wouldn't have posted the disclaimer. But he also wouldn't have picked two people who hadn't been vetted for fealty toward Howard Dean and then turn over the front page of his blog to them at least 3 days of every week.
Markos is capable of answering his critics, and refreshingly there even seems to be some criticism of the WSJ coming from the periphery of the mainstream media, as Markos has shown on the front page. But if this idiotic story continues, the role of Markos isn't the only issue relevant to this discussion, it's also important to assess his integrity by looking at what he did with his blog. And one of the things he did with his blog is turn it over three days a week to someone who he either already knew or soon discovered did not support Howard Dean's primary campaign, and who eventually even actively supported Dean's opponent Wesley Clark.
If one's goal is simply to shill for a candidate and discredit that candidate's opponents, one would have to be stupid to turn over your metaphorical megaphone to somebody whose thoughts and agenda are unknown to you and who may use that megaphone to proselytize for a cause antithetical to that for which you are supposedly whoring, as Armstrong Williams did for the Bush Administration. But Markos isn't stupid. And his goal, as stated to me explicitly and suggested implicitly, is to have an influential blog where people come for good writing, clear thinking, fresh information and sound analysis, and where they can become part of a progressive community allied with but not under the control of the Democratic party. As such, he had no interest in the kind of ideological purity and reliability one would need to ensure so that your shilling for a candidate would not be undermined by those with whom you entrust editorial control over your blog.
In fact, when you consider that Markos relinquished continuous control of Daily Kos during the primaries to me and Meteor Blades (and others such as Melanie and Theoria) without knowing whether we would write critically or negatively about Howard Dean, and if you accept that Markos is not stupid, then the only way you could conclude that Markos was involved in some sneaky plot to use Daily Kos to deceptively shill for the Dean campaign is if you yourself are pretty damn stupid.
