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Friday, January 14, 2005

No, no one pays me to do this
Posted by Jill | 10:28 AM

In typical wingnut fashion, the Usual Suspects on the right have sought to participate in the concerted effort to draw attention away from the Armstrong Williams payola scandal by "investigating" bloggers they claim are doing "the same thing."

The wingnut journalism community can't have it both ways. You can't look down on bloggers as being somehow unworthy of the moniker "journalist" and then say they must adhere to the same standards as "real" (i.e. print/broadcast) journalists.

The fact of the matter is that most bloggers, myself included, don't claim to be journalists. Anyone who thinks that they're getting unbiased, unfiltered news here, other than the links to and excerpts from articles that run in the MSM, is, quite frankly, an idiot. One read of this blog will tell you that what you are getting here is opinions -- and strong ones at that.

But one thing is for sure: the opinions expressed here are my own, drawn from my own mind, my own research, and my own ability to process information and draw a conclusion based on those factors. You won't get mindless dittohead parroting of ANYONE'S talking points here.

And perhaps that's what bothers my cybertrolls so much -- the fact that I can't be put into some kind of Republican-defined traitorbox. I'm a middle-aged, white woman who doesn't call herself a feminist because of the negative connotations, some of them the fault of the movement itself, of that word, but who does believe that women are just as good as men and should have control over our own lives and our own bodies. I've been married to the same guy for over 18 years; with him for over 20. It's a first marriage for both of us. I've never once been unfaithful, which already puts me one up on most of the morality police. I'm gainfully employed, I make a decent living and am a homeowner. I have an A+ credit rating, pay my bills on time, put money in the parking meter, go back into the supermarket to pay for the bell pepper that I found lodged in a corner of the grocery cart when I get out to the car, and give back the excess change when the cashier makes a mistake.

And I'm an unabashed, unashamed, unrepentant liberal. And they can't stand it.

And this is why certain individuals have joined in the "let's exonerate Armstrong Williams by pointing the finger at bloggers" party by accusing me elsewhere of being on the take; that somehow I must be getting paid by someone to spout my opinions, because no one would have opinions like mine any other way.

And I thought I wore a tinfoil hat. How many hoops do you have to jump through to come up with that one?

The payola accusation is the last refuge not just of a dying industry (mainstream journalism), but of an intellectually bankrupt group (Bush supporters who find it more and more difficult every day to justify the actions and policies of their designated messiah, so they lash out at others).

But I'm just small potatoes in this here blogpond, being accused by petty, small-minded people who have nothing better to do.

This whole tempest in a teapot originates with this article in the Wall Street Journal, in which former Howard Dean campaign manager Zephyr Teachout claims that 'Howard Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political "bloggers" as consultants so that they would say positive things about the former governor's campaign in their online journals'. One of them is Kos, who clarifies here that he has always disclosed his connection with the Dean campaign, just as Atrios has a disclaimer at the bottom of his blog that while he works for Media Matters, the blog is not connected with him.

But the issue is not whether the Dean campaign used Daily Kos as a paid advertiser, the issue is that (quoted from Kos) "WilliamsGate is fucked up because 1) he took taxpayer money (it's your money, as Republicans like to say), and 2) he didn't disclose the payments."

The Armstrong Williams payola scandal must be scaring the living daylights out of not just the journalism community, which conveniently has the blogging community to point to as a diversionary tactic, but all the apologists for the Bush Administration, because a) the scandal does not seem to be going away; and b) it may be just the tip of the iceberg. No one is claiming that laws weren't broken here, the question now is how far it goes and just how many people were paid WITH TAXPAYER DOLLARS to flack for Bush Administration policies. Given how many so-called news people in print and on the air seem to simply read their marching orders from the fax from the Rove compound (apologies to Morning Sedition), and given that we now have a documented case of a so-called "journalist" taking government bribes, well, that ought to concern Americans far more than some middle-aged Jew in New Jersey who signed up six months ago with a free blogging service and has maybe....MAYBE....6000 people a month reading her rants.

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