Conservative Bloggers Paid to Support Partisan Candidates

I am obviously doing something seriously wrong. Why you ask? Because I haven't been getting paid - and often paid very well - to write what politcal candidates and parties want me to write. However, while I - and I suspect most of by LGBT Blogger Summit compatriots - do not hold back in our criticism of the Obama administration, Congressional Democrats, and many others, our counterparts on the right are in many instances raking in the cash to say nice things about GOP primary candidates, etc. For example, it seems that the blog Red County received $20,000 from the Meg Whitman campaign in December, 2009, which has sent the site $15,000 a month since then. I guess if one is willing to sell their soul, then conservative blogging can be quite lucrative. The Daily Caller has details on this faux independent citizen journalists. Here are highlights:
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Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information “like piranhas in a pool.” But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.
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“It’s standard operating procedure” to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that “at least half the bloggers that are out there” on the Republican side “are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales.”
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In California, where former eBay executive Meg Whitman beat businessman Steve Poizner in a bitterly fought primary battle in the campaign for governor, it sometimes seemed as if there was a bidding war for bloggers. One pro-Poizner blogger, Aaron Park, was discovered to be a paid consultant to the Poizner campaign while writing for Red County, a conservative blog about California politics. Red County founder Chip Hanlon threw Park off the site upon discovering his affiliation, which had not been disclosed.
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But while Red County’s Hanlon expressed outrage at Park’s pay-for-blogging scheme, questions arose about his own editorial independence when it emerged that Red County itself had been taking money from the Whitman campaign. In December of 2009, Red County received $20,000 from the Meg Whitman campaign, which has sent the site $15,000 a month since then.
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The money is ostensibly for advertising, yet by conventional measures the numbers don’t add up. According to Quantcast, Red County reaches around 125,000 unique viewers per month. Two new media industry experts confirmed that, given such a readership, Whitman’s ad purchase is “ridiculously” expensive, surpassing the going market rate for such ads by 1,000 percent or more.
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Ad purchases at above market rates are a common means by which some campaigns seek to influence bloggers, according to numerous campaign operatives and bloggers. Bloggers, aware of this, have begun to request improbably high rates on their own.
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Lowell Feld, who writes for the liberal political blog Blue Virginia, has received a considerable amount of money from Democratic campaigns, including $21,000 from Lt. Gov. candidate Jon Bowerback in 2009. Feld discloses his consulting work on his blog.
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Dan Riehl, who writes the Riehl World View blog, is one of Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele’s most vocal defenders in the conservative blogosphere. . . . . “Riehl World View” readers might be interested to know that Riehl is not simply a blogger, but also a paid consultant to the RNC.
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If it appears that conservative bloggers are more likely to take campaign money than their liberal counterparts, there may be a reason. According to Dan Riehl, conservatives can’t rely on the infrastructure of foundations and think tanks that supports so many liberal bloggers.
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many of the groups now employing liberal bloggers meet with White House aides for a weekly strategy session on Tuesday afternoons organized by the group Common Purpose. It was here that Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously told independent-minded liberals that they were being “fucking retarded” for straying from the party line.