From The Daily Caller:
Katie Couric once described bloggers as journalists who gnaw at new information “like piranhas in a pool.” But increasingly, many bloggers are also secretly feeding on cash from political campaigns, in a form of partisan payola that erases the line between journalism and paid endorsement.
“It’s standard operating procedure” to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that “at least half the bloggers that are out there” on the Republican side “are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales.”
Supposed examples are cited. But most of them involve allegedly inflated ad rates or consultancy gigs. There's no evidence that true payola is rampant. As Althouse observes, "It's so annoying to read an article like this. The headline and first paragraph make you think it's a big exposé and the rest is a lukewarm mishmash."
... there's nothing wrong with a publishing project that is targeted to readers that particular advertisers will want to reach. What's wrong with a political blog getting into a lucrative niche? It will need to draw readers too or it won't get the advertising, and no one can make people read. It's a built-in safeguard. Really, what is the problem?!
In any case, here at PB.com, we remain pure. <TONGUE IN CHEEK>Mainly, of course, because no one has offered us envelopes stuffed with cash, but even so we remain pure.</TONGUE IN CHEEK>
Ed Morrissey thinks that blogger payola should be self-regulated via disclosure so as to prevent government regulation. Doug Mataconis agrees.
But let's play devil's advocate as we ponder payola for a minute. Should we automatically condemn it? In 1979, Nobel prize laureate in economics Ronald H. Coase argued that radio payola has two beneficial purposes: (1) it is an informative signal of musical quality and (2) an efficient form of compensation that gives disk jockeys optimal incentives to identify emerging musical talent. R.H. Coase, Payola in Radio and Television Broadcasting, 22 J.L. & Econ. 269 (1979). The former function is fulfilled because payola provides a credible and highly tangible signal of which new singles recording companies believe will be hits. The second function reflects the fact that payola is a form of profit-sharing, through which the record companies share the income stream generated by frequent airplay with the DJs.
Payola also provides a way for small and independent record companies to break through the dominance of the major recording companies. A small independent distributor has a hard time competing with the heavy advertising budgets of the majors, but cash in hand gives them a way of doing so. Payola thus promotes diversity and, to borrow a political metaphor, helps challengers who face the many advantages of incumbents.
Disclosure of payola undermines these effects. Listeners will discount the DJ as an information source (see, e.g., Alan Freed), making him less valuable to the recording company, which will make them less willing to pay payola.
Brandeis was quite right that sunlight is the best disinfectant. As the hygiene hypothesis teaches us, however, sometimes we're better off with the germs.
