The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Into the jaws once more
: Slate D.C. bureau chief Chris Suellentrop goes after Kos — not for taking money from Dean, which he disclosed, and not for using a blog for activism, but for this:
The hanging offense is that Moulitsas took money from other, undisclosed, political clients. And while he may have disclosed
I’ve written about this several times around the blogosphere, but I’ll post it agin in a comment here. The scandal here is about what a lazy journalist Chris Sullentrop is.
Here’s the deal. All federal election money is regulated by the Federal Elections Commission. If you want to see if someone is getting money from a campaign, you can! And people do, all the time. I visit the FEC database weekly to check in on groups I support and groups I oppose and see if there’s anything new there. Journalists with a capital J all over the country do the same thing I do as a regular blogging citizen. Any reporter who’s ever covered a political campaign large or small knows how to look stuff up in the FEC database.
If Sullentrop is so F*cking interested about who Kos’ clients are, he can find out. Hell, if the FEC database is too hard for him to search, there are websites who make it easier. http://www.tray.com is a great source of information. As is http://www.opensecrets.org.
Sullentrop’s lame comparison is the scandal here, not anything that Kos did. Why does anyone actually take the mainstream media seriously anymore, when they just spew out more and more wrong misleading and poorly worded horse shit day after day.
Sullentrop should be fired for his stupidity.
Heh and if they did pay him they should get their money back! :D
11/4/2004: Kos Kandidates Krushed
I’m a Kos fan, but I have to admit I’m skeptical. Why hasn’t Markos come right out and said “none of the Kos Dozen paid me?” If the Bush camp dodged such a question while wingnutters chanted “there’s nothing in the FEC docs, nothing in the FEC docs,” Kos would be the first person to call them on it.
It’s not that anyone can find out if they look that matters, it’s that Kos wrote that he’d signed non-disclosure agreements. That, to me, says a lot about the campaigns he was working for and about him. I agree with Suellentrop
Ben,
Not to be lazy, but since you’ve already been writing about this and I don’t see a point in completing redundant research: Did you already confirm or rule out any payments made to Kos by candidates he endorsed?
Er, the fact that an enterprising person can find something out (through, say the FOIA, about, say, a conservative commentator who runs ads on his TV show for the Dept. of Education in plain sight) doesn’t mean that the person involved in it should not disclose it. Sorry but you cannot claim that Suellentrop’s argument does not hold water and at the same time attack Williams.
oh how quickly we become what we claim to despise … no link to Kos’ own comments on this matter?
The only Zunigas listed on opensecrets.org were Bush/Republican donors and 3 payments totalling $17k by Jim Moran (D-VA) to Armstrong Zuniga, LLC.
Moran was not on the Kos list.
“Sorry but you cannot claim that Suellentrop’s argument does not hold water and at the same time attack Williams.”
Well, yes you can, if there’s nothing in the FEC documents that indicates Kos received any campaign money from the people he was raising money for. Sullentrop was too stupid or lazy to find out. You assume there’s something that needs to be disclosed.
Another thing. Isn’t the citing of this Sullentrop article another example of one blogger regurgitating the unproven, and probably false charges raised by some other blogger? Isn’t it irresponsible to engage in this type of behavior? Let’s see, there was another prominent example of this type of thing that’s happened recently. I can’t quite put my finger on it. I think it involved something about the CIA, Iraqi bloggers, etc. Anyway, it’ll come to me.
I asked and found out from Kos that Jarvis never tried to contact him or ask any questions of him; he merely linked to Suellentrop’s bogus article. That’s bad reporting: lazy and incomplete. But, sadly, that’s how some reporters behave: They don’t want to ask the one more question that will ruin the story they want to write.
Mick – Kos did exactly that. on Monday he wrote:
“Now, what would’ve happened had I been paid by any of those campaigns, and had I not disclosed it? Well, someone would’ve sifted through the FEC reports of the campaigns in question and publicized the relationship (and it would’ve come out, just like it did in SD).
Then I would’ve had to answer to you, the readers.
To me, that’s scary, so I steered clear. I wrote about none of the campaigns I worked for except one, and that one was disclosed. I endorsed no campaign I worked for.”
Ethics
Suellentrop doesn’t have comments. Jeff does, and he reads them. He generally responds pretty well to calm, rational comments.
Here’s your chance.
To address some of the other comments:
Mick – He did: “There’s been questions as to whether I was paid by any of the campaigns I endorsed in the ineptly named Kos Dozen. The answers is no.” From http://dailykos.com/story/2005/1/18/25414/7565
Hubris: I did search for several different spellings and word combinations of Armstrong Zuniga and didn’t find any payments from members of the Kos dozen. I did find payments from other candidates, including my congressman Jim Moran, who I dislike. I posted many diaries and comments supportive of Jim Moran’s opponent on Dailykos during the campaign and Kos did not censor my negative comments about a campaign that was paying him. Nor did he enter the discussion that erupted from several of the diary entries.
HH: There’s a HUGE difference between finding something out from a FOIA and searching the FEC database. The FEC Database is online, an contains a known quantity of information. A FOIA is a request for information which is known or unknown, and the information garnered from a FOIA is not instantly available to reporters writing about a story. Also, there’s no expectation that information requested in a FOIA request is pubically available. There is simply no way that anyone can make an analogy between the Kos and Armstrong situations and have it considered valid. It was laughable from the start and continues to be.
Ben, I’m curious.. who other than Moran were you able to find?
Suellentrop is too easy on Kos. He says the little activist has never claimed to be a journalist, and this is not the case. He obtained press credentials on the basis of his Political State Report blog, which is an apparent exercise in journalism.
Kos wants to have it both ways, claiming to be a journalist when it suits him, and an activist when it doesn’t.
“You assume there’s something that needs to be disclosed.”
Oh silly me… USA Today should have assumed nothing needed to be disclosed about Williams. Carry on then.
The difference between opensecrets.org and FOIA is quite the act of hair-splitting. Unless there is something barring someone from using the FOIA, which defeats the entire purpose of the FOIA to begin with. (Again, the only information that was new to us in the FOIA about Williams was the extent of it – the amount spent and the portion of the contract where he was asked to push the NCLB act on-air, which he claims he disregarded, while Paige claims it was merely an advertising contract. Anyone who saw Williams’ show knew they were advertising already, just like we knew Kos had some affiliation with Dean, we only now know the extent of it.) One is slightly more difficult to find out than the other but that’s not much of a distinction. And of course, I envision that FOIA requests will be made easier as the technology progresses.
This article is a week old and is complete garbage. You link to it, you own it. I guess JJ will have to call himself “pondscum.”
“You link to it, you own it.”
Duncan Black says it, you parrot it.
Actually, Atrios was merely encapsulating the JARVIS rule:
https://buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_12_16.html#008676
Responding to this quote from Juan Cole:
” I drew attention to Martini Republic’s questions about the independence of IraqTheModel without actually expressing any opinion myself one way or another, except to say that they are out of the Iraqi mainstream. The dittoheads who read them and can look at the above polling figures and come to a different conclusion are just innumerate (if only they were also so illiterate as to be unable to figure out my email address).”
Jarvis said:
“What a crock of Cole crap that is: If I point to a report that Jews were responsible for 9/11 and say nothing to correct or disagree with it, then I’d say I’d be guilty of anti-Semitism and blood libel. That is the ethic of the link.”
I guess the “ethic of the link” only binds people who say mean things about Republicans.
still waiting for that link to Kos … just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean the rules change, buckaroo … you sure aren’t looking good here, Jarvis.
Responding to Richard Bennett (above), as I also did at his site where he posted about this:
At the risk of getting even slightly embroiled in this mess, though Markos started Political State Report in Jan. 2003 I have operated the Political State Report site since Oct. 2003. I would appreciate that clarification added to your post.
In case anyone looks, the site still does exists on Dailykos.net because I have not had the technical wherewithall to move it to my own server. That will happen this year, however.
I took Political State Report over after Markos said the site would die if someone didn
There are exceptions to every rule and IMO, “Screw them” when discussing people who were massacred by terrorists is a pretty good exception.