Kos: Gettin' Paid "Blogola"?

Like payola involved paying DJ's to play records, "blogola" would involve paying bloggers secretly to shill for politicians.

Or "Kosola," some are calling it, because it chiefly seems to involve Kos. And his sorta-partner, Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com. (Which is reassuring, because no one's offered me dick.)

If you don't know, Kos and Armstrong are occasional partners and co-authors of a book about "people-powered politics." Kos does the Daily Kos; Armstrong does MyDD.com. Or used to do MyDD, until he admitted the conflict of interest and just became a full-time political consultant.

So he doesn't really have a blog presence anymore, though he understands the usefulness of such a presence. If only there were so way he could take money directly from politicians and yet provide them with a big blogosphere forum...

But such a thing surely isn't possible, given that he no longer has a blog, right?

Welllllll... who knows.

Kos is now very high on Mark Warner of Virginia, who just so happened to throw a lavish party at the YearlyKos, and just so happens to have Armstrong on his payroll.

Now, Kos is a very partisan lefty, so it's curious what he's doing cozying up to a pro-war centrist Democrat-in-name-only (as Kossites would have it) like Warner.

Could there be something shady going on here? Wouldn't be the first time for Armstrong. Armstrong took money from a basically worthless company to post "impartial" endorsements of its stock on a market message board.

Now Dan Riehl finds that now-governor Corzine of New Jersey opened a "diary" on Daily Kos as Corzine was simultaneously paying money to Armstrong's "political consulting" company.

Hmmmm...

Let's say, hypothetically, you wanted to work both inside and "outside" the political system. One person couldn't do both; working for someone, taking money from a politician, makes you obviously biased.

But I wonder... I wonder... would there be some way that, I don't know, two people, say, could both be paid by politicians and also get lots of advertising income for a supposedly independent media outlet?

I know, it's crazy. There's no possible way something like that could work.

posted by Ace at 11:11 PM

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