ONE OF the more interesting fallouts from the recent election season barely concerns President Bush or the ambitious second-term agenda that is dominating Washington's pockets of power. Predictably for the new century, it involves a few guys sitting at a computer.
When it was revealed this month that the Department of Education secretly paid commentator Armstrong Williams to promote Bush's first-term education bill No Child Left Behind, an uproar resulted around Williams and speculation over whether other commentators have taken money for political promotion.
Shortly thereafter, Zephyr Teachout, the former Internet director for Howard Dean's failed presidential run, claimed in a post on her blog that the Dean campaign had hired two prominent Democratic bloggers, Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of DailyKos, as consultants, with the primary intention of securing pro-Dean commentary. "To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal," Teachout wrote.
The hubbub spread to the conventional media, and The Wall Street Journal breaking the story on Jan. 14. Condemnation from print media encircled the two bloggers amid typical print finger-wagging at the infant medium.
The two bloggers, Armstrong and Moulitsas, seem clean in the matter. The affair has clearly been overhyped. Both men are professional consultants who blog on the side, so nothing is unusual in a campaign hiring them, and it is clear that neither man considered himself to be receiving money for praise. Furthermore, other Dean campaign aides have called Teachout's claims into question, saying that the two were hired as consultants and nothing more. For their parts, Armstrong stopped blogging during the time he consulted for Dean, and Moulitsas posted a disclaimer on his site, advising his readers that he was on the Dean payroll. Moulitsas has also put to rest more serious speculation that he may have taken money from other candidates in exchange for urging his readers to donate to them.
But more interesting than the particular accusations themselves is the larger issue of blog ethics as many political blogs' readership rival those of major newspapers and magazines. In the hoopla, Moulitsas and Armstrong have been accused of conflict of interest, and there have been general calls more stringent ethical standards on the blogosphere.
It is hard to believe anyone could be surprised by the suggestion that Internet-based material could be tainted. The "reader beware" mantra has surrounded the Internet as long as it has existed, and continued with its proliferation.
In such an open medium that inspires so much suspicion, calls for strict conflict-of-interest rules are generally misguided. Blogging is a hugely amateur medium -- extremely few bloggers earn money from their writing or purport to be selling a professional product by posting their musings online for free. To argue that bloggers should refrain from writing about topics in which they have a financial stake undermines the strength of most good blogs -- that people write on the side about their expertise: their jobs.
Since its advent, most people have considered the Internet to be a type of print medium, so it is therefore not surprising that there are calls for Internet writers to conform to print ethical standards like conflict-of-interest rules. But hardly anybody online pretends to be a journalist. According to the Pew Institute, over 8 million Americans have created blogs. In such a pedestrian arena riddled with hearsay and typos, it is obvious that most authors are unprofessional. The majority of the millions who have carved out their corner on the Internet purposefully peddle in a type of information more common than well-presented truth: their opinions. And as with any opinion, the best way to protect readers is for readers themselves to beware. Writers that inform readers of less apparent biases, such as Armstrong and Moulitsas, should be commended. Blogs should be free to have no standards, and as long as they don't, readers should stay suspicious.
Blogs occupy a very different place in the media from typical journalism, so old rules can hardly apply to them. In condemning a new medium, many have failed to realize its novelty and a need for its own rules. The responsibility of developing them has to rest with each blog itself, which must learn to garner the needed level of trust from its readers -- that is, if it and its readers do, indeed, aspire to trust.
Michael Slaven's column usually appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at mslaven@cavalierdaily.com.
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