Saw this on John Gushue's site: It's a Deaniac explaining her understanding of this blogging payola imbroglio -- and her explanation has Kos calling for a retraction from the Wall Street Journal (see my original posting for details).

Some excerpts from from a Blog for America post by Laura Gross transposed onto Daily Kos:

(BTW, the Jeanne that Gross mentions is WSJ reporter Jeanne Cummings who had covered the Dean campaign and who had been speaking with her on background:)

Jeanne's colleagues committed a journalistic no-no: they took her background conversation with me and made up a quote from "a Dean spokeswoman". Their fake quote had this spokeswoman apparently admitting that the bloggers were paid for promoting the campaign. They completely mischaracterized our conversation -- and Jeanne was rightly upset about it. I was, and am, too.

Since a distorted version of the conversation has been put in print, I'll tell you what was told to Jeanne when she asked what the story was with the campaign and these bloggers.

I said that, as many media outlets noted at the time and a giant disclaimer on their blog said, these guys were hired as technical consultants. Specifically, they helped the Web team pick a technology platform for the blog (Movable Type) and helped manage Internet advertising (banner ads, Google ads, etc.). They weren?t paid to write content -- either for the campaign or on their own blogs. And just in case there was any ambiguity, the campaign made sure they had a notice saying "I am a paid consultant for Howard Dean" right smack on the front of their personal blogs.

The only people the campaign paid to write blog posts were full-time staff at headquarters who wrote the content here on Blog for America. They and the rest of the staff at headquarters were people who quit their jobs and upended their lives to work 100 hours a week for a campaign they believed in -- and frankly, compared to "normal" jobs, the campaign barely even paid them. Had the campaign been throwing around cash to people just to write nice things on blogs, there would have been a mutiny in Burlington.

The point was also made that, besides being not true, this kind of accusation is in fact the exact opposite of the truth. Hundreds of thousands of people gave their time, money and hearts to the Dean campaign; all they wanted in exchange was their country back. They organized in their communities and they organized online, and many of them blogged every minute of it.

Some people even made the trip to headquarters -- on their own dime. They stuffed envelopes by day and slept in motels or on someone's couch by night -- and they blogged that too. To suggest that there was some network of paid advocates, as some of the more irresponsible outlets have done, disrespects one of the best things to happen to our democracy in a generation.

Jeanne's colleagues not only misrepresented my conversation with her, they also made a sloppy and completely ridiculous analogy to the Armstrong Williams scandal -- an analogy that has been snapped up and repeated ad nauseum by both lazy journalists and the right-wing media machine.

Here's the deal: the campaign paid these guys with private funds to do work that did not include writing content or otherwise talking/writing about the campaign -- and widely disclosed the relationship at the time anyway, just in case. The Bush administration used taxpayer dollars to pay Williams to lace his commentary with praise for a certain policy -- and both the administration and Williams covered it up. Also, it appears that what they have done is illegal.

Addendum (Feb. 2)

CBC Radio's The Current looked at blogging in light of the DailyKOS affair. Jim Elves of BlogsCanada was less than impressed.

I was extremely disappointed with the one-sided nature of your report.

You spent plenty of time on the pitfalls and perils of blogging. You cast aspersions on the credibility of bloggers. You trotted out legal experts whose expertise is limited to the United States. This is all par for the course. Over the past few months, numerous news articles and features have been published on bloggers who were fired from their jobs due to their blogs. It ain’t news.

Well, maybe it is news but its just one part of a big story. I kept waiting for the part where you would talk about progressive companies who use employee blogs as an effective public relations tool. I waited to hear about people who were hired on the basis of the writing abilities and research skills that their blogs display. I listened to hear how bloggers, untethered by editors and corporate sponsors, acted as fact-checkers and whistle-blowers on the mainstream media. 

In short, I looked for balance and fairness. I didn’t find it.

I guess that CBC is no different than other mainstream media. Bad news is good. Good news doesn’t exist. 

Elves' post has links to the audio files of the original program.