POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Bloggers do it for the money?

Working title(s): Dan Riehl, please kick my ass/ Hi, I'm Jenny, I'd like to piss of everyone I respect

Ugh, I'm conflicted.  I'm about to break one of the cardinal rules of the rightosphere (per The Other McCain): Don't f*** with Dan Riehl.  I particularly don't want to f*** with Dan Riehl because he's been good to me.  He's another one of the handful of bigger bloggers that goes out of his way to support smaller bloggers.  But I think he's overreacting today.  At issue is The Daily Caller's top story from this morning, True stories of bloggers who secretly feed on partisan cash.  The gist is an accusation that major right-wing bloggers are paid (either outright or through obscene ad rates) to endorse particular candidates (cough, Meg Whitman, cough) or promote a particular organization's agenda.  Riehl calls it a hit piece.  I call it a serious accusation that should be investigated.

Riehl is one of the bloggers mentioned in the article,

“Riehl World View” readers might be interested to know that Riehl is not simply a blogger, but also a paid consultant to the RNC. In an interview, Riehl said he was paid an amount in the “hundreds of dollars” for writing a strategy document on how the RNC could better reach out to bloggers. Riehl said his motivation for defending Steele was to aid the Republican Party, and that he didn’t disclose his consulting work because, “I didn’t see it as having anything to do with my views... I never made enough money to be bought,” he said.

Which brings us back to "you don't f*** with Dan Riehl".  He's pretty pissed.

It was not a secret that the RNC paid me a few hundred bucks for a document.

I devoted hours and hours of my own time over a period of months trying to coordinate an effort involving many top bloggers and the RNC to improve communications and legal, legitimate cooperation in a partisan sense. I stress that, as it was the RNC that made me aware of certain FEC restrictions, which we were careful to not violate. That's why money wasn't involved. I made phone calls, took meetings, paid Metro and lunch costs, all out of my own pocket because I am dedicated to improving the blogosphere in an ethical manner - as well as winning politically for Republicans at the ballot box. I won't name which top bloggers were involved, but there are many that could vouch for these facts if they wanted to. If they want to stay out of it, that's fine, too.

That's part of a much longer post.  He seems to have a beef with Tucker Carlson, personally, and claims to have  some kind of dirt on The Daily Caller.  We'll see.  It stems from DC's widely criticized reporting about the RNC's spending habits earlier this year.  I defended DC then, too.  The only part of that story I took issue with was one sentence in the initial article that did read like Michael Steele had personally spent RNC money at a bondage club.  RNC money was spent at a bondage club, among a number of other silly ways, but definitely not by Michael Steele.  Other than that, it was a perfectly valid story and DC earned my trust by having the guts to report it.  That whole personal accountability thing was the biggest draw to conservatism for me.  While Riehl and others seem to see criticizing our own side as some sort of betrayal, I say if we can't handle legitimate criticism from each other we're in no shape to be in charge of anything.  And that goes from Sarah Palin to your local coroner.

As for DC's credibility as a news organization, Riehl says,  Tucker Carlson took millions, gave himself a nice office in DC and does little good partisan journalism for us, while using his editorial page mainly to push an anti-Cap and Trade effort. And that, while attacking the RNC and now a conservative blogger - to bolster DC's rep as a serious media outlet, when I'm not sure it is, perhaps?

I could be wrong, but the way I understand Carlson's goal for DC is a focus on reporting, not on partisan anything.  If the investors that gave him millions of dollars thought he was going to do anything else with it, that's not my concern.

I think Riehl has good reason to want to put DC's accusations in context, but I do think he is overreacting now in the same way I thought he overreacted back in March.  Instead of taking issue with some details that may be in error, he's dismissing the whole story.  Nothing to see here.  I think I'll have a gander anyway.

This story wasn't just about Dan Riehl.  The story was about major right-wing bloggers not disclosing compensation for endorsing particular candidates, totalling thousands of dollars in some instances.  I'm not against bloggers being paid.  That would be insane.  But if they're doing a specific interest's bidding that must be disclosed for the best interest of the reader, the blogger and the right as a whole.  I submit that a good guage would be for bloggers to ask themselves if they found out a left-wing blog was doing it (and I know they do even worse) what would they write about it?

Some other people have some thoughts about this.  I thought The Other McCain's were particularly insightful.  As I've said elsewhere today, I don't pretend to be anything but a hapless n00b at this.  I only blog because I find it to be an efficient platform for my thoughts on a range of topics.  Melissa Clouthier seems to be on team Riehl, just as she was after Bondage-gate.   Read it.  She makes some great points on the overall issue.  Ed Morrisey is bein' all right about everything like Ed Morrisey tends to do.   

My final conclusion is that this is a valid story that could have been reported better.  Perhaps the politics of political writing is more of a clusterschtup than I thought (and I thought it was a pretty F-ing big one).

crossposted at KillTruck

Kill Truck

KillTruck is a wife, mother, blogger and native midwesterner now living in Eastern Washington state. She writes about politics, pop culture, parenting, wifing and a few other subjects she has no authority to write about. She has macabre fascinations with prostitution and/or cannibalism. In her free time she enjoys eating and/or drinking her feelings, liveblogging Lifetime movies, thinking about Scott Brown and mocking things she doesn’t understand.

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