Stealth Bloggers

On Calitics.com, Leubitz writes that he started the site in Sept. 2005 "because of a lack of transparency in the statehouse." This spring, Leno's campaign hired him part-time at $500 per month to maintain the campaign's Web site and handle e-mail. Ross recalled thinking it strange that someone with press credentials should be part of a candidate's team: "You're up here with these news outlets, but you say you're supporting Mark Leno? Shouldn't you be here with the audience?" (It should be noted that Ross has his own political blog.) Leubitz says he had intended to tell Nation that he should speak to someone else from Calitics who wasn't employed by the Leno campaign.

At first glance, all this can seem insignificant; paid bloggers generally have small audiences. But their readers sometimes include influential political mavens, and some journalists troll blogs in hopes of encountering what they believe to be worthwhile information. This paid-for "information" sometimes gets turned into mainstream news stories.

"What happens on these Weblogs affects which state donors get into the race, how opinion makers decide who to support and not to support," Ross said. "I think a lot of the work the Leno campaign did that made it credible — that they could beat Carole Migden — that was done online."

Brigham said bloggers-for-hire cause no confusion because Web scribes have developed a convention of identifying their conflicts of interest. He, for one, wrote that he was "proud to do some work for Leno" in italics when he posted Calitics items promoting the campaign whose Internet operation he led.

"Any time I write about something where there's any money exchanging hands, I disclose I'm working for somebody," Leubitz said. "I think people can take it as they may. The Internet is different for a number of reasons, because I specifically take positions, which, for most journalists, is not the case."

The idea that it's okay for opinion columnists to take payola is ridiculous to anyone in legitimate journalism. Columns that are bought and paid for are, as a rule, just as worthless as paid-for news stories. The muddied waters don't stop here. Public-relations flacks have also taken over the space once occupied by letters to the editor. Campaign consultants' duties can include monitoring and writing in the comments sections of blogs and Internet news pages. "There was a time when there were people paid by the campaign who were commenting on blogs," Higgins said. "It was not a primary role."

This battle between journalism and independent commentary, and people posing as journalists and independent commentators, has been going on for generations. For this reason, the U.S. Senate has long taken pains to ensure that the only outsiders given the run of the galleries are "bona fide reporters," according to Rule 33. This does not include those "engaged in any lobbying or paid advocacy, publicity, or promotion work for any individual, political party, corporation, organization, or agency of the U.S. government."

If current trends keep pace, the California press corps will mostly include this compromised group. They'll continue to make politics, and Internet reporting on it, suck even more than it already does.