As much as 1960 is remembered as the first US election where television had an impact, 2004 was the bloggers' election. From the early support for the Dean campaign to challenging the authenticity of the CBS memos on George Bush's military record, the online pundits broke new ground. You could say that they were writing the rules as they went along.
Funnily enough, that is what two of the leading Democrat bloggers are now accused of. According to Dean's former internet director, Zephyr Teachout, Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD were hired as consultants "largely in order to ensure that they said positive things".
Her post was picked up by the Wall Street Journal and gained a certain currency: not least because it came soon after rightwing commentator Armstrong Williams was under fire for pocketing $240,000 (£130,000) from the federal government to promote the No Child Left Behind Act. The National Society of Newspaper Columnists put out a statement explaining that he had never considered himself a journalist but accepted he did "portray one through his commentary in print and the electronic media".
Fox News (via a transcript on News Hounds) looked at both on Bill O'Reilly's show. "Media being paid by special interests," he began. "Last week I spoke with conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, who took money from the Department of Education, which was flat out wrong.
"Now comes word from the Wall Street Journal that the Presidential campaign of Howard Dean paid two internet bloggers to say positive things about the governor. Again, flat out wrong."
It was well timed in terms of softening the scandal from the Williams revelations, and Ms Teachout conceded in a later post that some on the left were right to be cross with her. "I should have known better than posting during this time," she writes.
But O'Reilly's argument that political bloggers must be judged by the same standards as journalists (including those who portray themselves as such through their work) is not something I would even begin to disagree with. Both need to be believed and trusted if they are to have any worth. Dan Gillmor, an evangelist and observer of the new media, however disputes what he calls a "lazy equivalence" between Williams, and Moulitsas and Armstrong for a few case-specific reasons.
There are differences, big ones. Such as: One of the bloggers shut down postings when he moved to Vermont to join the campaign, and the other prominently (on his homepage) disclosed that he was consulting. Williams and his backers did not disclose anything until USA Today outed his conflict of interest. And the Williams affair involved the White House itself, not merely a wannabe candidate for the office. You and I - taxpayers - got the bill for this sleaze.
In Moulitsas and Armstrong's defence, Ms Teachout revealed that while the bloggers were paid "over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds" ($3,000 a month for four months) they were never "committed to supporting Dean for the payment - but it was very clearly, internally, our goal".
As Gillmor says, Armstrong also stopped blogging while he was working for the Dean campaign and Moulitsas disclosed his financial interests. It may not have been the best way to handle the situation, but it is not exactly sleaze. In the interests of disclosure, I should also state that Moulitsas was a Guardian Unlimited columnist in the latter stages of the US election campaign.
Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds (who was also a Guardian Unlimited columnist) takes emails from Moulitsas as he sets out his version of events and then opens up his comment board to see what his readers have to say about the ethics of it all. There is some dispute on his comments section about if Moulitsas made his disclosure as obvious as he could have done, but support for the principal of openness. One writes: "The blogosphere is all about getting good information that is unavailable elsewhere. And if someone deliberately tries to hide his interests - that is a problem." It is one rule worth sticking to.
