Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Some of you may’ve followed a controversy of a few weeks ago in which Markos Moulitsas asked members of a private discussion group not to discuss a pending SEC investigation against his friend and sometime business partner, Jerome Armstrong. The New Republic seized on Moulitsas’ missive as if was marching orders from the Don himself. From there, David Brooks and Chris Suellentrop (both of the NY Times) picked up the story and ridiculed Kos for what they viewed as his George Patton-like performance. None of this struck me as particularly important or interesting.

But Suellentrop at The Opinionator did broach what I thought was an important issue. He pointed out that Kos at one time (working for Sherrod Brown), and Armstrong even now (Mark Warner) do political consulting while running/writing political websites. So the obvious question, at least to me, is how does a political blogger who endorses candidates at his site create a transparent environment when he may also be consulting for–or have some other undisclosed relationship with–some of these same candidates? Peter Daou has gotten himself into the same potential pickle (at least in my opinion) by announcing he would join HIllary Clinton’s campaign while still maintaining his Daou Report at Salon. All this strikes me as a conflict of interest waiting to happen. Perhaps not the most heinous or troubling conflict of interest. But given the level of hackery and puffery in politics (including online politics), I feel it’s important that bloggers fully disclose such relationships.

I wrote a post about this and republished it as a diary at Daily Kos. To be clear, I explicitly said that I wasn’t raising this issue in order to attack or criticize Kos. Rather, I was raising it in an attempt to keep the entire playing field as level as possible. I also, in this post, specifically criticized John Thune’s behavior in hiring political bloggers to create sites which savaged Tom Daschle without revealing their affiliation with Thune. I added that I found this Republican behavior even more troubling than that of Armstrong or Kos.

In short, I expected some might not like what I wrote. But I simply wasn’t prepared for the onslaught. There were of course the gratuitous insults, deliberate distortions and other doo-doo humor in the comments thread. There’s this from Boadicea:

You’re missing a tag “Things blown out of my butt about which I am completely, utterly clueless”.

And there was this delightful one from Opendna of the (I kid you not) Socal Cossacks Network, which only proved the validity of my code of ethics concept:

You’re a prostitute, eh?

Are you suggesting that I must be willing to compromise my ethics for a couple thousand dollars in consulting fees?

Are you suggesting that I’m such a cheap intellectual whore that I’ll endorse someone because they take out advertising on my blog?

Them’s fighting words, bitch. Say’em to my face and I’ll put you on your back.

That you’d even ask these questions suggests you have no respect for your own integrity - it’s for sell cheap, eh? Would you lie to America $10K? Evidently, you would.

Some of us put a higher value on their integrity. slutSome of us make our living on our integrity. Just because you’re a $1000 ho, doesn’t mean the rest of us are. So, yeah, maybe we get a little agitated when someone challenges it with nothing to back them up.

In short: You ain’t shit. Try again.

To hear an ass like this talk of “integrity” and “ethics” makes a mockery of the very terms. He may “make a living” but certainly not on his integrity.

And there was oh so much more. First, in the Kos diaries anyone may add tags to a diary entry. So some of the ‘really mature’ site members take it upon themselves to police diaries they don’t like by adding malicious tags. That’s what a delightful schmuck named Boadicea did. [UPDATE: Boadicea below claims she did not engage in this behavior. Apparently, when she suggested to me (in the comment quoted above) that I add a tag that would've been malicious in nature, this gave another Kos coward the brilliant idea to do so. But the 'credit' for the above quoted comment is still all hers.] So I edited my diary entry to remove the malicious tags. Then, I contacted the site admin to report the tagging behavior and ask that the tagger not repeat this behavior.

Since the overall tone of the comments were so distressing and uniformly insulting I let the diary slide for a week or so and only yesterday visited it again. I found new malicious tags (”Concern Troll, Blah, blah, blah, schmuckery”) to replace the earlier ones. The effect of wiping out real tags and replacing them with insulting ones is that your diary is no longer available for searching since the real keywords which a reader might search have disappeared. The bad apples have essentially “disappeared” your diary (at least from the search process). I’ve replaced them yet again with legitimate tags. But of course the diary is now so old that it won’t matter.

In the diary’s comment thread I wrote a comment just after posting the diary replying to some misunderstandings/distortions raised by other commenters. Since commenters were claiming I was ignorant of Kos’ record on this issue, I asked readers to post links to any statements he might’ve made so that I could educate myself. Wonder of wonders, that comment too has disappeared.

Yesterday, I wrote another post to the site admin asking for an explanation of this behavior. So far, neither of my two e mails has received a reply.

And the final oddity of this whole episode is that several commenters told me in no uncertain terms to delete my diary (”This diary should be deleted”). I simply couldn’t believe it. Given what I thought was the nuance I tried to add to my post, why would Kos’ protectors and defenders get so indignant that they’d insist that I delete the post. What was my crime? What was so damaging about the diary?

I want to make clear that I am a progressive Democrat (which is why I’ve posted diaries at Daily Kos for quite some time) and I have no love for David Brooks or the New Republic. But I have to say that behavior like what I’ve described above–not just behavior by members, but apparently behavior aided and abetted by the site administrator/s–allows me to understand some of the criticism of Kos and his site flung at him by his critics. My treatment made me feel more like I was participating in a cult in which I’d insulted the chief leader and was receiving the deep six treatment in response.

We Democrats critical of precisely this type of rigid, censorious, know-it-all behavior on the part of conservatives? What is wrong with questioning our standards and behavior once in a while? Must one be labelled a “concern troll” and political enemy for suggesting that political bloggers observe a code of ethics? What are the people at Daily Kos afraid of?

In a controversy almost too complicated to describe, The New Republic attacked Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas for asking his supporters not the dignify the report that Jerome Armstrong, founder of MyDD and ally of Kos, was subject to an SEC investigation with a response. The political hatchet men at TNR and Slate’s Mickey Kaus have had a field day with histrionic overstatement in attacking Kos’ alleged “silencing” of his supporters. The entire story reeks of being a non-story kicked until it feebly attempted to raise its head off the ground.

Markos Moulitsas: do political bloggers need a code of conduct?

In my opinion, the NY Times’ political blog, The Opinionator, has captured a far more important issue not directly mentioned elsewhere. He notes that Kos and Armstrong have been paid political consultants for various candidates (Mark Warner and Sherrod Brown among others) whom they’ve both covered and endorsed in Daily Kos. While Kos has made clear to his readers that he’s done consulting, he hasn’t featured his disclosures so prominently and clearly. Though Opinionator author, Suellentrop seems to attach more devious intentions to Kos’ actions, I don’t. But there is a conflict of interest in accepting money from a campaign which you endorse in your blog. Unless you clearly note the financial relationship, you are asking for lots of trouble and lost credibility when the news comes out. And even if you do acknowledge it to your readers, how do they know to what extent your endorsement has possibly been “bought” by the consulting arrangement?

After the 2004 election, it was discovered that Republican John Thune had surreptitiously paid several Republican operatives to create anti-Daschle blogs which were supposedly written by political independents. The thought that a candidate could so rig the political debate as to potentially throw an election disturbed me and the NY Times enough that they wrote about it. In my post, I proposed several suggestions that might aid political bloggers faced with dilemmas like Kos’:

1. Whoever endorses, promotes or supports any candidate via their blog (this would include hosting banner ads, writing posts promoting or attacking candidates, etc.) should disclose what, if any relationship you have with the campaign. If you are being paid, tell your readers by whom and how much. Even if you’re not being paid, if you’re coordinating your posts in any way with a campaign or consulting even unofficially, you should reveal this.

2. One way of avoiding some of the hassle is to refuse to accept paid advertising or consulting fees from campaigns. Since I haven’t ever received anything from a campaign, I wouldn’t want to presume to tell those who have that they should stop doing this. But they should be aware that it becomes highly problematic for your readers to figure out how transparent and candid you’re being with them in your posts.

Those who read Slate have seen prominent disclosure notices which indicate the site is owned by the Washington Post whenever the Post is featured in a story. This is the type of full disclosure which I think the political consulting issue warrants for political bloggers.

In light of The Opinionator’s new information, I think it’s incumbent on Kos and all liberal political bloggers to adopt a code of conduct when it comes to our relationship with political campaigns. If we want to maximize our influence on political debate we can’t afford to have our message compromised by such ethical doubts in the minds of the public.

One of my major criticisms of The Opinionator is that he breathlessly covered Kos’ alleged misdeeds without acknowledging any similar Republican misdeeds within the blog world like the Thune outrage I mentioned above. Kos’ actions don’t even come close to the unethical conduct of Thune. Republicans, in fact, have brought this type of deceptive blog conduct the fore first with far more egregious ethical lapses. But that doesn’t mean that Kos shouldn’t face the music and try a new tune as far as full disclosure and transparency goes.