I have studiously avoided commenting on the flap over Zephyr Teachout's post about the Dean campaign's payments to a couple of bloggers, because the whole thing seemed like a minor inside-baseball dustup fanned by the right to try to defuse the Armstrong Williams scandal. (Tim Grieve in the War Room walks us through it all. And Teachout's more recently posted FAQ provides needed context and defusing.) The payments to Kos and MyDD were disclosed at the time; I remember reading about them; there's just no ethical equivalency. (Nor is there a financial equivalency: Total Dean payments to two bloggers appear to have been around $12,000, compared with $240,000 to Armstrong Williams -- and who knows how many other Bush payola plants still to be outed?)
But the discussion resulting from the controversy is worth having, so let's at it.
Jeff Jarvis talks about the need for disclosure in a post that parallels my thinking on a lot of this stuff, and asks whether we shouldn't have metatags for people. (This is actually what Marc Canter has been talking about forever, and the digital identity people keep trying to find an approach that will stick.)
That's all well and good. But before we even get to something as complex as machine-readable personal tagging, there are simpler and bigger problems at hand: How many times have you followed a link to a new blog and been unable to figure out who's writing it? I'm not talking about blogs that are intentionally anonymous; I mean bloggers who just haven't gotten around to posting a "Who am I?" page or link, or who have chosen some sort of willful semi-obscurity even as they blog openly about their coworkers and friends and projects. This is ground zero of transparency, and it seems to be beyond a significant portion of the blogosphere. "Who or what made this page, and what should I know about them?" is the first question to teach everyone about being a smart user of the Web, and it applies just as strongly to blogs as to any other type of Web site. I wish more bloggers made it easier for their readers to find the answer.
So let's put that aside and look at the more complex question of so-called "blogola." Starting point for this discussion should be the simple fact that everyone's perspective is potentially influenced by their financial interests. More so than political leanings or personal relationships, financial involvements are generally understood to be the A1, top-of-the-list category of conflicts of interest. So it will be relevant, for instance, for readers of this blog to know that I earned my paycheck until recently from Salon Media Group -- or that, for the moment, I'm on leave working on a book, and living on a book advance from my publisher. My readers here have a right to know that -- or rather, if I choose to hide where my living comes from, my readers have a right to be suspicious, to not grant me their trust. If I have a financial entanglement with someone I'm writing more specifically about, I better reveal it -- or sooner or later, someone else will, and my readers will rightly feel betrayed.
In traditional professional journalism, these questions are obviated by the interposition of the media company between the journalist and his paycheck. The media company collects cash from advertisers and readers, pools it and pays its reporters and editors. In ethical terms, you could describe the media employer here as a sort of money launderer -- by the time the dollars land in the journalist's checking account, they are supposed to have lost all the potentially compromising markings of their sources. A New York Times writer doesn't know which of his paycheck dollars came from Macy's and which came from the used-car classifieds, and so the provenance of his wherewithal cannot (theoretically) influence his work.
In blogging, this buffer between dollar and writer vanishes. The best bloggers, understanding this, do everything they can to disclose their financial interests; this doesn't automatically grant them credibility -- that's earned post by post -- but it is a necessary precondition. It says, "Here's what you should know about my interests as you consider what I have to say."
Blogs take a multitude of forms: only a small fraction are close to traditional reporting or commentary; many are personal diaries; others are platforms for companies, political campaigns, movements or organizations. And so the effort to apply the ethical yardstick of traditional media to all blogs is doomed: It mistakes the publishing technology for the published contents. It's like saying that newspapers follow one set of ethical practices, so all entities that publish on paper -- be they mailorder catalogs, government publications, free shoppers or your Uncle Joe's annual Christmas letter -- need to follow suit.
Now, if your government publication tried to pretend it was a newspaper, you'd have a right to complain. (This is precisely where the Bush administration has played fast and loose, with its "Karen Ryan" video press releases masquerading as independent press reports.) When categories get blurred and things enter a fast cycle of change, as has happened in today's publishing world, the central ethical principle -- the only ethical principle that you can be sure will apply in all cases as the ground shifts under you -- is disclosure and transparency.
If you reveal your interests and you don't dissemble -- if you tell your readers where you're coming from and you don't pretend to be coming from someplace else -- you're likely to do fine. This approach works as well for the "standalone journalist" as for the corporate executive or the P.R. person or the political advocate. The only people who stand to lose are those who were profiting from a system that allowed them to keep their sources of cash relatively obscure. (Why does the word "lobbyist" spring to mind?)
It seems to me that efforts to categorize bloggers are ultimately futile; there are as many different kinds of bloggers as there are bloggers -- which is why generalizations about them so often err. That's why I take issue with this passage from an otherwise extremely good Chris Nolan piece on these matters:
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What's now known as the "blogosphere" is about to fracture.... There's going to be a division between folks writing online with lots of editorial experience and tested news judgment and those who are coming to this with an agenda or a set of very specific goals. Sooner or later -- it's already happening, really -- the activists will break away from the editorial folks. |
I don't know what Nolan means by "break away," and I don't really get how the blogosphere can fracture; it's already in a million pieces. The two categories Nolan describes can never be fully disentangled. Consider, for instance, the work of Josh Marshall. He is as well-credentialed a "real journalist" as anyone blogging today. Yet his blog, which has provided some of the smartest commentary on the Republican effort to dismantle Social Security that you will find anywhere, has most recently spearheaded a campaign to identify and list those "fainthearted" Democrats in Congress who might be considering breaking ranks and supporting Bush's plan, so readers can contact them and try to get them to line up in support of Social Security.
What sort of tag would you use here: Activist? Journalist? Or something for which these older labels are inadequate? We've got "tested news judgment" and "a set of very specific goals," together, right there.
These waters have run together; you won't ever divide them again. It's one big pool. We're never going to be able to sort people out and put them in neat little boxes, and that's okay. But we can try to keep the water clear.
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