Category: Media

Re: the Kos flap, Chris Suellentrop points out that bloggers like Kos inhabit a bit of a netherland between journalism and activism:

Moulitsas is a different case. He’s never pretended to be a journalist – this past October, he told National Journal, “I am part of the media. But a journalist? No. If I had put a label on it, I would say I am an activist.” – but in the year since he stopped cashing Dean’s checks, he’s gained a reputation as “the liberal Instapundit” and the most popular left-wing blogger.

Suellentrop doesn’t quite appreciate how ambiguous Kos’ position really is. He started a bi-partisan blog in 2003 called Political State Report to cover politics at the state level leading up to the 2004 election. One of the purposes of this blog (to which I contributed for a while; see this entry commenting on one of my articles) was to obtain press credentials to cover political events such as the conventions. When this was announced, I quit and asked for my postings to be removed because it was obvious that the press role was in conflict with the activist role. I was an activist, and had been for a while, and didn’t want to try and pass myself off as anything else.

So Kos has pretty consistently leveraged his activism with consulting and journalism of a sort, no matter what he’s saying now. So regardless of how you feel about Zephyr Teachout and Jerome Armstrong, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is a study in conflicts of interest and limited credibility.

Via Jarvis.

UPDATE: Temple Stark, current editor of Political State Report, is insistent that I mention Kos is no longer associated with Polstate, other than providing hosting for it. He doesn’t want this efforts damaged by association with Kos, and I can appreciate that.

Mr. Sharkansky of Sound Politics will be on Brit Hume’s show tonight discussing this:.

Another week, another blog controversy, and once again Hugh Hewitt is in the middle of it. This one deals with an alleged conflict of interest on the part of Daily Kos, and it’s been spread into the MSM by an article in the WSJ and into the nutcase media by Hugh Hewitt’s “Black Blog Ops” appearance on the O’Reilly show. Anybody who reads this site knows I’m anything but a fan of Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. I once contributed to a left/right blog he set up to cover the last election, but quit when I sensed it wasn’t serving my interests. Not a fan at all. That being said, the allegation that Markos’ ties to the Dean Campaign were not adequately disclosed is every bit as much a load of crap as Hewitt’s attack on the MSM for reporting on the efforts by creationists to inject religion into biology classes in Pennsylvania. Anyone who read Kos on a regular basis during the election year knew he had ties to Dean, and anyone who’s read Kos even once knows he’s a Democratic Party activist and fund raiser. Hewitt is completely off base (once again) on this controversy and he’s got no business trying to pass himself off as some sort of authority on blogs for the purpose of flogging his own book on the O’Reilly show by helping the Falafel Man trash bloggers generally. Hewitt’s popularity is a testament to the rampant stupidity in American society. He’s a man of no insight, a panderer, and a wart on our democracy.

And don’t even get me started on O’Reilly, the only man in America capable of making Air America look good. Bloggers, especially those of us in the political center and to the right, had better realize who our friends are in this world. Self-promoters like Hewitt, O’Reilly, and Armstrong Williams are not among them.

Incidentally, the attempt by the ethically-challenged former gossip columnist Chris Nolan to reduce the Kos controversy into an inside-politics conspiracy to keep Dean out the Democratic Party chairmanship is no more persuasive than another tinfoil hat theory I’ve heard that right-wingers drummed it up for a similar reason or to take the heat off Williams. Zephyr Teachout raised the issue because she thinks it has important implications for blogging, and if you look at it closely it doesn’t incriminate Kos or Dean. Her thinking was just her thinking, so if anybody looks bad it’s mainly she, not Dean, Kos, or the Party.

UPDATE: As if on cue, Zephyr digs a deeper hole for herself. What a sad case that woman is.

There is another way to look at the Rathergate story, however. While the left sees it as simply rushing a story onto the air before all the nasty details were spruced up and the right sees it as liberal bias, it can be seen, quite convincingly, as personal animosity on Rather’s part against the Bush family, going back to Dan’s attempt to ambush Poppie Bush on Iran/Contra only to have his ass handed to him on a platter concerning his walking off the set in a snit when a football game threatened to run over into this time slot. While we can never tease these explanations apart completely, personal animus has to be at least part of the story.

That, and Dan’s just a weird bird with enough power to play out his personal problems on the air at the most critical juncture in a presidential campaign.