Sunday, July 13, 2008
Editorial: Bloggers on the take
Many online scribes accept cash and other perks from the people they write about.
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
These days, everyone seems to have a blog. Uncounted legions pour their thoughts onto the Internet. They write about angsty teen life, Virginia Tech football and gardening. They review video games, new cars and appliances. Some of the most popular ones challenge the day's news and politics.
Blogs can be entertaining and informative, but readers should exercise caution. Many bloggers serve hidden masters.
Most bloggers do not pretend to be journalists. Their Web sites are just forums for sharing their thoughts, little more than virtual diaries.
Others fancy themselves viable alternatives to what they derisively call the mainstream media.
Some pull it off. They break news, offer insightful commentary, and elevate political discourse and the news industry. Bloggers revealed that falsified documents about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard had duped many traditional news organizations.
Other bloggers do not do as well. They might look like legitimate news sources to the casual observer, but they willfully blur the lines between journalism and campaign hack.
Journalists, real journalists, follow strict rules about conflicts of interest. They do not take money or gifts from groups they might cover. They also maintain a wall between news, opinion and advertising functions.
That is not the case with many bloggers. In Virginia, for example, Lowell Feld, the man behind the liberal blog RaisingKaine.com, is getting special treatment from Democrats. They will seat him on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in August as an "embedded" blogger.
Feld has had a cozy relationship with Democrats for a while, working as a paid consultant for some of their candidates.
Such relationships are increasingly common among bloggers looking to make a buck. They accept money or other perks from a candidate or party and then write about them.
Arguably, many would have written the same things anyway and only work for candidates with whom they already agree.
Perhaps, but money has a tendency to taint objectivity. That does not disqualify bloggers from a place in the media spectrum, but those who rely on them for their news and commentary should keep in mind the potential conflicts when they choose whom to trust.
