January 14, 2005
An Ethical Issue For Campaign Consultants?
GUEST: Jack O'Toole
Former Dean campaign official Zephyr Teachout set off a bit of a firestorm in the blogosphere yesterday over matters ethical when she wrote that the Dean campaign originally hired popular lefty bloggers Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MYDD 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." (Kos and Armstrong offer rather, uh, spirited responses here and here. And Teachout revises and extends here.)
Needless to say, the resulting uproar has been entertaining, if somewhat predictable, and you can follow it all by visiting this typically thorough roundup over at Memeorandum.
MORE: The Wall Street Journal weighs in on the story -- or nonstory, if you prefer -- here.
Posted by Jack O'Toole at January 14, 2005 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
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