CAESAR'S WIFE

The Wall St. Journal has a story this morning about Kos and Jerome from MyDD being paid by the Dean campaign. (Shock! Horror! Instant moral equivalency to Armstrong Williams being an illegally-paid, non-disclosed shill!)

Kos points out (quite rightly) that he made prominent disclosure, and so did Jerome, who closed down his blog while working for Dean.

That said, though, I'm still more comfortable with blogs remaining independent voices. I don't begrudge any blogger a few bucks - it's that, having been a journalist, I know how friendly contact with the people you're covering blunts your edge. ("Gee, he's not really such a bad guy.") And while most newspaper ethics guides follow the "free lunch" rule (i.e. it's assumed you have enough integrity that you're not bought off for the price of a meal), I'm not so sure.

It's the socializing that's the real problem. Once you see a political figure as a human being, it makes you slightly less willing to go for the jugular. Is the solution to never go for the jugular? When it comes to politics, that's suicide.

Like Izzy Stone, I really despise the Beltway cocktail-party culture, where journalists and politicans mingle a little too freely. And it's a slippery slope for bloggers. Once you start taking money from people you're writing about, what really makes you different?

It's a legitimate question, even when it comes from people we don't respect. (Maybe even more, because our integrity has a lot to do with our credibility.)

What civilians usually miss is, journalistic ethics aren't really about actual conflict of interest - they're about the appearance of conflict. Anything that undermines public belief in the integrity of the coverage is rightly seen as a bad thing, to the point where many journalists even refuse to register to vote, or register only as an independent.

While those standards are not always met, they're there. And bloggers should continue to stay on their toes about this stuff.

How do you readers feel about this? Where should the line be drawn?
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