Bush Paying Off Bloggers?
What follows is blogging about blogging, and will probably be pretty boring to you non-bloggers.
Is Pajamas Media (of which I am a part) nothing but a cover to channel funds down from the White House to the lowly denizens of the blogosphere for favorable coverage? Is the whole thing nothing but a bunch of corrupt Republicans scratching one another’s backs? Is it a “Right-Wing Circle Jerk,” as Oliver Willis so eloquently put it? Is this new media company just an extension of the Pentagon’s paying for favorable news stories to appear in Iraqi newspapers?
Tony Pierce connects some dots, you decide.
Sounds pretty paranoid to me, though.
As a member of PJ Media I can tell you that the only thing they’ve asked of me is a picture for my profile and to sign a contract which stated, specifically, that they would not exercise any editorial control over my writing. There was a clause in there which stated that they could cancel my contract (with a certain amount of notice) should they choose, but that’s in there for obvious reasons. It is certainly reasonable to expect PJ Media to retain the option of removing me from their group of bloggers should I do something crazy. Like turn this into a neo-Nazi site or something.
The only thing I’ve received from PJ Media is a nice write-up in the profile section of the website and one bonus check for signing the contract. Not one person has told me what to write or what not to write.
Frankly, Tony’s theories are a bit hard to believe. If the intent of PJ Media is to control what member blogger’s are writing, how does anyone think they’ll get away with it? Last time I checked there were 70 members of PJ Media, none of whom really know each other all that well. In order to pull this conspiracy off every one of those members would have to remain quiet about the collusion requested of them. All it would take to blow the whole thing wide open is one blogger getting angry and posting all the dirty little secrets. Given the rather independent nature of bloggers I just don’t see that working.
I have seen a lot of nasty things said about PJ Media on the internet, both from the right and the left. Member bloggers have been accused of being self important, and the whole project has been written off as nothing more than a bit of ego-stroking. I just don’t understand where all that is coming from. All PJ Media has ever been is a way to band relatively high-traffic blogs together to leverage advertising dollars and create a portal for organizing what is being said in the blogosphere. Frankly, the portal business has never made much sense to me but the advertising part does.
What’s wrong with trying to make a little money from this, if we can?
And, for the record, I have never seen anywhere where liberal bloggers were denied access to PJ Media. Any one of them, Oliver Willis and Tony Pierce included, could have joined. They didn’t, nor did any other left-leaning blogger. My guess is that this is because the project was headed up by a group of right-leaning bloggers and given the high-strung, partisan nature of the blogosphere there is probably a lack of desire to “reach across the aisle” for much of anything, advertising dollars included. And that’s too bad, because the portal part of the project would be a lot more interesting with some more diverse opinions.
Regardless, accusations of PJ Media being some sort of device to bribe bloggers is so false as to be laughable. Readers of this blog know that I am regularly critical of the President on issues ranging from domestic spending and illegal immigration to the signing of campaign finance reform and the new prescription drug entitlement into law. I happen to think that this President has it right on foreign policy, but that hardly makes me an administration shill.
But if thinking that way helps people like Tony and Oliver get through the night, so be it.
