There seems to be an outbreak of ethical scandals and
pseudo-scandals among bloggers and pundits lately, doesn’t there?
How to keep them straight? Herein, a field guide, each with its own
Impropriety Level (I.L.), measured on a scale of one through ten,
one being entirely innocuous and ten being heinously unethical.
Jon Lauck & Jason Van Beek: During the 2004
campaign, these South Dakota bloggers, of Daschle v. Thune and
South Dakota Politics, respectively, did excellent work keeping up
with that state’s Senate race, and tweaking the Sioux Falls
Argus Leader. Neither disclosed, however, that they were paid
advisers to the Thune campaign, either on their blogs or in columns
that Lauck wrote for National Review Online. I.L.:
7.
Anyone reading their blogs would have learned very quickly that
Lauck and Van Beek were pro-Thune, and both were blogging before
they were hired as consultants (though Lauck had worked on Thune’s
2002 congressional campaign). According to Lauck, because it was
reported in South Dakota media when he was hired by the Thune
campaign, he didn’t think to put a disclosure statement on his blog
or to let NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez know about it when
his columns were prepared. If he had so disclosed, Lopez wouldn’t have run his pieces at all, and the
national audience for their blogs would have read their work in a
slightly different context — and not felt deceived when they
learned of the consulting work in December.
Armstrong Williams: In the most infamous of
these cases, the radio and television host and syndicated columnist
received $240,000 from the Department of Education to promote the
No Child Left Behind Act. Not only did Williams record ads for the
law in which he interviewed Education Secretary Rod Paige, his
contract called for him “to regularly comment on NCLB during the
course of his broadcasts.” He didn’t properly disclose this
relationship when commenting on the law, either in broadcast or in
print (he wrote several columns about NCLB). I.L.:
9.
Outrage at Williams is justified; not only did he fail to
disclose his financial interests, his shilling for the Department
of Education was done on taxpayers’ dime (not, say, with campaign
money). Tribune Media Services, his syndicate, properly dropped his
column after USA Today reported on the contract.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga: The host of the
popular lefty blog DailyKos.com, Moulitsas, better know as Kos, ran
a consulting firm with fellow blogger Jerome Armstrong of mydd.com;
they worked for Howard Dean, among other candidates. Armstrong quit
blogging during the campaign, and Moulitsas put a disclaimer on
DailyKos stating that he was doing technical consulting for Dean
and other campaigns that, because of non-disclosure agreements, he
couldn’t reveal. Recently, Dean campaign aid Zephyr Teachout
revealed that within the campaign, there was a sense that Moulitsas
was hired more to get his blog-readers on Dean’s side (before he
was hired he was saying many nice things about Wesley Clark) than
for his technical consulting services, which they could get
elsewhere for a better price. I.L.: 3.
Since the campaign, Moulitsas hasn’t made a habit of disclosing
who he’s worked for — something most media figures would do. He’s
repeatedly insisted that since he’s “not a journalist,” standard
journalistic practice doesn’t apply. Revealingly, he told
Glenn Reynolds that he doesn’t think there was anything wrong
with what the South Dakota bloggers did. And given that he’s
written, based on a vague comment by Armstrong Williams that “there
are others,” that “we can assume every conservative pundit is on
the White House’s payola rolls,” it’s hard to give him the benefit
of the doubt. Ultimately, though, as far as the contract with the
Dean campaign goes, it’s the consultees rather than the consultant
who deserve scorn; Moulitsas was more of a dupe than a shill.
Maggie Gallagher: The most overblown of the
scandals. In 2002, Gallagher did some work for the Department of
Health and Human Services on the Bush administration’s
marriage-promotion initiatives — preparing presentations for
officials and authoring brochures about marriage, and similar
things. Later, when she wrote about related issues, she failed to
disclose the work she’d done. I.L.: 2.
Howard Kurtz, who broke this story this week, has tried to link
it to the Williams case; so have Ted Kennedy and Frank Lautenberg,
who’ve proposed a “Stop Government Propaganda Act,” stating that
“Funds appropriated to an Executive branch agency may not be used
for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States
unless authorized by law.” But Gallagher’s case is different — she
was paid for work she’d done for HHS behind the scenes, not for her
public work. Her editors at National Review Online and
Tribune Media Service say they would have preferred to have a
disclosure, but they are not saying, as NRO did with Lauck
and as TMS did with Williams, that they wouldn’t have run her work
if they had only known.
Michael McManus: Like Gallagher, McManus worked
for HHS on a marriage initiative, in his case giving education and
training seminars; like Gallagher, he did not disclose his
relationship when he wrote about the initiative in his syndicated
column. I.L. 2, assuming there isn’t more to the
story (it’s the latest to have broken).
This is exactly the same situation as Gallagher’s. Dr. Wade
Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at HHS,
announced yesterday that the department would be implementing a
policy that forbids working with experts who work in the media.
That would either result in fewer experts writing publicly or fewer
working for the government; let’s hope it’s the latter.
While it’s impossible to disclose every conceivable conflict of
interest all the time, if commentators would merely remember to
disclose as much as possible, a lot of the current panic over
ethics would be deflated. Whether or not opinion writers and
bloggers qualify as “journalists,” they — we — certainly owe
readers that modicum of courtesy.
