Now it turns out that a couple of big time blogs were in the bag for Howard Dean last year. The Wall Street Journal reports that The Daily Kos, the ninth biggest blog in the blogosphere, was paid $12,000 to serve as "technical consultant" to the Dean campaign.
The partisan Democratic political bloggers who were hired by the Dean campaign were Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos. DailyKos is the ninth most linked blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a measurement service, and in October, at the height of the presidential campaign, it received as many as one million daily visits.
In their defense the two popular bloggers insist they breached no ethical boundaries:
The two men, who jointly operated a small political consulting firm, said they didn't believe the Dean campaign had been trying to buy their influence. Both men noted that they had promoted Mr. Dean's campaign long before they were hired and continued to do so after their contract with the campaign ended.
Mr. Zuniga said they were paid $3,000 a month for four months and he noted that he had posted a disclosure near the top of his daily blog that he worked for the Dean campaign doing "technical consulting." Mr. Armstrong said he shut down his site when he went to work for the campaign, then resumed posting after his contract ended.
Be that as it may, Viewpoint wishes its readers to know that we are not for sale. We have never accepted any money from anyone in return for our support. Of course, we have never been offered any either.