An interesting "scandal" has broken out -- this time involving a prominent U.S. liberal blogger, and only days after it was revealed a prominent conservative black commentator had received $240,000 US to shill for the No Child Left Behind Act.

I wonder if the timing of the revelation about Markos Moulitsas of DailyKOS is coincidental? :) However, also named was Jerome Armstrong of myDD.

Apparently, the Howard Dean campaign hired these prominent bloggers as "consultants" during his presidential bid -- in the time honoured hope that they would say nice things about him.

Here is what Zephyr Teachout, former head of Internet outreach for Dean, said on Jan. 10 on her blog Zonkette:

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds, and they had several other clients.

While they ended up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment -- but it was very clearly, internally, our goal.

Conservative MSM coverage started in earnest on Friday, as near as I can tell.

Moulitsas swears he disclosed the payments at the time. Armstrong notes he shut his blog down while working for Dean.

Here's the take of Chris Suellentrop, Slate's deputy Washington bureau chief, on this:

Moulitsas is a different case. He's never pretended to be a journalist—this past October, he told National Journal, "I am part of the media. But a journalist? No. If I had put a label on it, I would say I am an activist."—but in the year since he stopped cashing Dean's checks, he's gained a reputation as "the liberal Instapundit" and the most popular left-wing blogger. And while it's true that his role as a Dean consultant was disclosed and reported in the press on multiple occasions, it came as a surprise this week to a whole lot of people, including a lot of prominent bloggers. Perhaps more important, the people who were aware of Moulitsas' consulting work aren't 100 percent comfortable with it. "Markos is infamous for these kinds of issues. That may be too strong a word. But it's come up with Markos before," Nicco Mele, the Dean campaign's Webmaster and director of Internet operations, told me. "I can find you threads on Markos's own site about it."

Moulitsas' crime isn't taking money from Howard Dean. He, too, can get away with a suspended sentence for insufficiently disclosing his role in the Dean campaign once he was off the payroll.  The hanging offense is that Moulitsas took money from other, undisclosed, political clients. And while he may have disclosed—in 2003—that he wouldn't disclose them, that's not good enough. DailyKos raised money for a dozen congressional candidates this past election. Which, if any, of them paid Moulitsas for the honor of directing his grassroots minions to part with their wallets? If you gave one of Moulitsas' preferred candidates money, wouldn't you like to know if Moulitsas' endorsement was purchased?

Here are some responses on DailyKos:

On Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds linked to a transcript of an O'Reilly Factor show in which this was, er, discussed, plus a link to blogger Ed Cone, who straightens out the bends made in the facts by O'Reilly.

Cone points to an observation by super-blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine fame, who said: "Kos and MyDD didn't do anything wrong (one put up a disclosure, the other stopped blogging). That's not the point of the discussion. If anybody did anything wrong in this, it could be argued that the Dean campaign did by trying to buy the voice of the bloggers (even though they already had their strong support). But that's not the real point, either. The points that Zephyr raises about our opportunity to define our culture and how the expectations of our public are what interest me. That's worth discussing (without all the brickbats back and forth from the various partisans here; I'm separate from that because I never backed Dean and you couldn't have paid me to). "

Here's an earlier Instapundit post on the subject, that also has some useful links.

David Akin, who posted about this to CAJ-L, has some thoughts on this at his blog. A CTV colleague, he makes the point that "neither The Daily Kos nor MyDD, though, contains disclosures now about how they pay their bills, something I think is important if you want your views on whatever issue to be taken seriously."

In the Wall Street Journal article David links to, there is the following:

Ms. Teachout said the campaign never explicitly asked the bloggers to promote Mr. Dean. But she said the Dean campaign wanted to keep them from shifting to rivals. Ms. Teachout said she has been raising the issue as part of a broader push on her part to get bloggers who are also consultants to publish their client lists. She said that as more people have turned to bloggers for news, she came to the conclusion that bloggers "have an active responsibility to be absolutely transparent."

Yes, that would be a good thing. However, it would be even more transparent than MSMs currently are.

If someone has a list, for example, that totals the amount of advertising revenue a given newspaper or TV station received over the course of an election campaign and from whom they received it ... well, I'd like to see it.

However, the problem may be potentially bigger at the blogger level, because the overall revenues will be smaller and so one major advertiser/sponsor/consulting client can have that much more influence.

The implication for those of us who work in the MSM but blog as hobbies are interesting. For example, let's say I was a music show host for a public broadcaster. I start my own blog. It's a big success. A major record label for the genre I program wants to advertise on my blog.

A few months go by, and now my on-air programming choices are almost all from my sponsor's label.

Everyone see where I'm going with this? All of a sudden, it's not my credibility anymore; I'm dragging my employer into it too.

A big can o'worms! :)