Friday, January 14, 2005

Kos on Kos

I don't see anyone linking to the source of the Blogging-for-Buck story about Daily Kos (I like to think of him as the leftist Tony Little). So here's his defense of himself, which is, I think, quite instructive. Try this quote:

So what's going on? Zephyr is obsessed with imposing journalistic standards on the blogosphere. We can debate the merits of this issue, and good points can be made on both sides (I think it's a dumb idea). But what Zephyr did, and which I find unconscionable, is that she took the Armstrong Williams issue, and made up shit about our involvement with the Dean campaign to score points.


I'm not sure how he gets to Armstrong Williams--Armstrong was getting funneled tax-payer money he never should have gotten in the first place and never disclosed anything; Kos was getting private money and he did make a fig-leaf disclosure (albeit only for one of his clients). But read Kos's post and see what sort of strokes he's working in.

(Bonus Kos note: In this post Kos writes, "it's not every day that I link to the so-called-liberal New Republic, but I like Ryan Lizza (he should write for TAP!)." I'm sure Lizza loves that endorsement.

1 comment:

Roger Snowden said...

I continue to be amazed at the efforts to define, and thereby contain blogdom. The idea of imposing journalistic-- or any-- standards on a phenomenon that is specifically about nothing, seems absurd.

If some blogger wants to pretend to legitimize himself by some act of "full disclosure", fine. And anyone who finds that blogger suddenly more credible is certainly entitled to hold such a belief. But they are fooling themselves. The blogosphere is exactly what you see today, nothing more, nothing less.

How would you make such standards uniform or universal? Issue a Blogging License?

Really now.