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Friday's Wall Street Journal has an article, "Dean Campaign Made Payments To Two Bloggers," that discusses payments made to Kos by the Dean campaign.
The partisan Democratic political bloggers who were hired by the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos. DailyKos is the ninth most linked blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a measurement service, and in October, at the height of the presidential campaign, it received as many as one million daily visits.
The two men, who jointly operated a small political consulting firm, said they didn't believe the Dean campaign had been trying to buy their influence. Both men noted that they had promoted Mr. Dean's campaign long before they were hired and continued to do so after their contract with the campaign ended.
Mr. Zuniga said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Dean said the two bloggers hired by the campaign did nothing unethical because both disclosed their connection to the Dean operation.
Ms. Teachout said the campaign never explicitly asked the bloggers to promote Mr. Dean. But she said the Dean campaign wanted to keep them from shifting to rivals. Ms. Teachout said she has been raising the issue as part of a broader push on her part to get bloggers who are also consultants to publish their client lists. She said that as more people have turned to bloggers for news, she came to the conclusion that bloggers "have an active responsibility to be absolutely transparent."