Cutting Kos Some Slack

I generally do not do much blogging about blogging. It always reminded me of the Simpson's episode where we discover someone (Chief Wiggum?) has a ham radio. The picture focuses in on the radio and you hear a crackling voice speaking in an exotic language saying the only thing ham radio people have to say to one another, "I have a ham radio." In a similar vein writing about blogging is just another way of saying, "I have a blog."

But, the controversy (such as it is) about the Daily Kos taking money from the Dean campaign is a little bit more interesting. You can get a variety of takes from the following links:

From the Daily Kos, their big piece of refutation: Laura Gross from DFA weighs in on Kos/Dean story
From Slate, Chris Sullentrop's take: Blogging for Dollars: Hang Daily Kos, but not for taking money from Howard Dean.
And from Hugh Hewitt: Black Blog Ops

For starters, I'll offer that the purpose of these allegation seems to have been to find a liberal Armstrong Williams. As that this story falls laughably short. The real analogy would be to the bloggers that worked with the Thune Senate campaign out in South Dakota, and while you had a couple liberal blogs go batty over them it was never that big a deal. Furthermore, the charge that Kos should have repeatedly told people about his Dean relationship is downright silly. Was he supposed to change the name of the blog to "The Daily 'I'm Cashing Checks From the Dean Campaign' Kos"? Saying it once where those people who read his blog regularly could see it IS enough. He should not be held accountable for the fact that other, more intermittent, readers might be left in the dark. If it was really that important to them they should read his blog more often.

That being said, there is more than a wiff of "He doth protest too much" over at the Daily Kos right now. If you read their "smoking gun" statements from Laura Gross (late of the Dean campaign) you can see the wheels coming off of their line a bit. She claims at one point,

I said that, as many media outlets noted at the time and a giant disclaimer on their blog said, these guys were hired as technical consultants. Specifically, they helped the Web team pick a technology platform for the blog (Movable Type) and helped manage Internet advertising (banner ads, Google ads, etc.). They weren't paid to write content -- either for the campaign or on their own blogs. And just in case there was any ambiguity, the campaign made sure they had a notice saying "I am a paid consultant for Howard Dean" right smack on the front of their personal blogs.

This comes across as near total BS. Any kid fresh out of an IT program at any junior college could have done what they were supposedly paying Kos for, and probably for a hell of a lot less money. The idea that Kos was not chosen because of the particular audience he had built for the Daily Kos just doesn't pass the smell test. Neither Kos nor anyone in the Dean campaign was that much of a neophyte. C'mon. Now, I don't think there was anything wrong with taking the money for services rendered, including the expectation that the Dean campaign was buying Kos's goodwill in the future. That's politics. Truth be told, it's also journalism. It simply does not make Kos a bad guy, but please don't ask me to believe that Kos is some virginal Snow White either. No one in this situation is that naive.

Kos' best line to his critics would have been to say, "So what?" If you read Hewitt and Sullentrop's pieces they don't really have an answer to that.