Remember the story a month or two ago about the “journalists” that the Republican Party or the Bush Administration PAID to write about pro-Republican policies? One of the KEY FACTS of the story was that the journalists DID NOT DISCLOSE that their “opinions” were funded by the Republicans.

Now comes a real journalist, Frank Rich, and tries to show that he is balanced by trying to find some left-leaning journalists who might have collected money from politicians.

PROBLEM: The examples he used DISCLOSED THE CONNECTION. So the analogy is BAD. God, what are we going to do with these people?

Daily Kos :: Even Frank Rich Falls for “Dean Paid Bloggers” Nonstory: “Even Frank Rich Falls for ‘Dean Paid Bloggers’ Nonstory
by DHinMI

Sat Mar 5th, 2005 at 17:04:18 PST

Update [2005-3-5 20:4:18 by Armando]: From the diaries by Armando.

(Cross-posted at The Next Hurrah)

One of my weekly pleasures is to read Frank Rich’s Sunday jeremiads, in which he regularly rails against the hypocrisies of our culture and the craven laziness of our press. So, it’s with great disappointment that I just read this:

Today you can’t tell the phonies without a scorecard. Besides the six ‘journalists’ we know to have been paid by the administration or its backers, bloggers were on the campaign payrolls of both a Republican office-seeker (South Dakota’s Senator John Thune) and a Democrat (Howard Dean) during last year’s campaign.

Frank Rich should know better. In an article where he’s decrying the laziness of the press in not following up on the Gannon/Guckert imbroglio, he makes the incredibly ironic mistake of falling for the canard that the relationships between Markos (who posted on Daily Kos that he was consulting for the Dean campaign on technical matters) and Jerome Armstrong (who completely shut down his own blog and didn’t write on it while working directly for the Dean campaign) is somehow to be equated with the deviousness and dishonesty of the tools in South Dakota who regularly slandered Tom Daschle under the guise of being independent voices of opinion without divulging their direct financial arrangements with the Republican party.

When even your most well-meaning friends like Frank Rich can screw up like that–and it slips past the fact-checkers at the New York Times–you can see the insidiousness and persistence of false stories being repeated in the media, and how getting rid of untruths like this one is like ridding a rundown tenement of cockroaches.”