infighting

The notion of a “blogger ethics panel” is a sort of big inside joke, and it’s a nice snarky comeback when people in the traditional media wail over the tone or reliability of some content from the “fever swamps.” After all, it’s not as though members of the traditional press, especially the political press, have any sort of actual leg to stand on.

And so fair enough. Joe Klein doesn’t get to lecture Atrios. Reasonable people agree.

However, I have an issue in that I don’t really want Joe Klein as my yardstick. I like reading blogs, and I do it because there’s real information there. As this is the first political cycle where the medium will be fully embraced (even Hillary comes out swinging with live webcasts), I expect we’ll see a lot of trickery.

And that’s a shame. It’s a shame that people who carry the title blogfather will go and say things like:

As a historical note, I was semi-involved with the Draft Clark effort. Markos and I had formed a consultancy group in January of 2003. I liked Dean; he Clark. We agreed that whichever hired us first we’d both work together on that campaign.

After they were hired, Jerome did not disclaim, but promoted Dean heavily. Markos posted that he did “some technical work for Howard Dean,” while helping to spread the word as well*. Somewhat misleading, I have to say.

Ah! But James Carville does the same thing! It’s true, you’re right, and as we said Joe Klein owes Atrios a million beers, but see that’s why I don’t listen to James Carville or Joe Klein, and haven’t for several years now. They’re both in their own way egotistical shills. Klein and Carville I mean. Armstrong and Moulitsas? Well, the jury is still out.

The bottom line is I want a better opinionsphere and I want better politics. Retreading the old paths isn’t going to get us there. If you want to blog a campaign blog it, and do it right and honest and open. Hidden agendas do not become us.

*Full disclosure, I really do do technical work for a friend of Markos’.

Jerome Armstrong, who I still have to post a recap about, continues to behave like a thug on MyDD. The latest example is a popular diary written by an Edwards supporter which takes Barak Obama to task for using similar language to Joe Lieberman. Jerome put it on the front page, and edited in an image from Google News with Edwards using similar language.

The image is two and a half years old, so that’s pretty weak sauce, but the point here isn’t the substance of the argument; it’s what Armstrong did with his admin powers.

Here you have a community site that’s had a pretty good vibe to it over the past year or two. It’s a community that has good things bubble up from the diaries, and has a smaller (but in many ways sharper) community of commentators than the bigger blogs.

On this community site, you have one of the admins taking a community contribution, editing it without permission to completely flip it around on the author, and putting the result on public display.

That’s thuggish, bullying behavior, and it’s destructive and wrong. Even if Jerome’s an Obama fanboy and was hurt by the community member’s diary — or maybe as he said was the case with Dean in this post and they’ve put him on the payroll so now he’s carrying water — this is a shitty way to behave on a community website. It’s a petty violation of what anyone would consider normal standards.

This upsets me partly because people in the campaign world think Jerome actually has good advice (highly debatable), but more because he really brings the whole tenor of MyDD down. Matt and Chris and Jonathan and the other posters have a good thing going, and Armstrong’s half-bright technology posts, childish abuses of admin power, and transparent frontpage shilling muddy the waters.

Jerome can say “it’s my blog, I’ll do what I want!” but frankly it’s not his blog anymore in spirit, even if he is the only one who can edit his own comments and change other people’s posts around. What MyDD has become, it’s become in large part because Armstrong left, and a more talented, capable, and community-minded group took over.

Basically I’ve heard enough stuff that I don’t trust Jerome Armstrong, who does a lot of technology consulting to sell people stuff and subcontract the work. So I finally had to call him out on something and it got a little unpleasant.

We’ll see how this plays out. I hope I’m wrong about Jerome’s motivations here, but it really looks to me like he’s trying to take a lot of credit and sell a lot of snakeoil, and then abuse his admin rights when I try and call him out on it.

UPDATE: After sleeping on it, I really do need to explain the whole “snakeoil” smear up there. There are too many ways to read what I wrote, and it’s not really what I mean. I have to work and get on a plane today, but I will write a post clarifying this in the air.