Why hasn't more payola punditry been uncovered?

From Anna Haynes on February 19, 2007 at 4:34 PM

Apologies for my faux pas, which stemmed from naivete - I hadn't stopped to think that this is the website of the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, supported by USC's Annenberg Center for Communication, where "Communication" means either "journalism" or "public relations" or, conceivably, some commingling of the two ("payola pundit").

Ooops.

From Anna Haynes on February 23, 2007 at 4:28 PM

I'm told via email that there's good work being done at Annenberg; didn't mean to tar all who work there with the same brush.

But why is raising the payola punditry issue met with utter silence? If payola punditry is defensible, could someone please defend it? If it's not, could someone please help strategize how to expose it?

There appears to be an elephant in the room.

From Robert Niles on February 26, 2007 at 2:56 PM

Well, to answer the original question... This could be a PhD dissertation. The confluence of money and journalism is not well charted, though many have tried. Most attempts at shaping public opinion are not has ham-handed as the attempts you mention, making them less "newsworthy," though they are no less worthy of public attention.

Eric Alterman does an excellent job of illustrating the U.S. right wing's information distribution (okay, that was a fancy way of saying "propaganda") network in his book, "What Liberal Media?" Moneyed interests pay to establish or fund foundations and think tanks which, in turn, pay and/or promote sympathetic writers, including many who appear on op/ed pages throughout the country. The think tanks serve as the "bag men," keeping the writers' hands clean.

The U.S. political left has not had a similar network, though a powerful left-wing blogosphere has emerged recently, to which some interest money is beginning to flow, often in the form of consulting or freelance blogging deals. Kos caught heck for a deal with Howard Dean in 2004, and he's publicly rejected such deals since, though others continue to make deals... and report them.

Some bloggers are the right are doing the same, though the more established infrastructure on that side (as described by Alterman) seems to remain the more lucrative method for talking points from that side to get to the public.

And that's just the political stuff. Several companies have started businesses paying bloggers to hype products and services in their blogs. (Check out the ads from writing gigs on Craigslist sometime to find such companies.) Again, that's a crude, simple example. Most attempts at influencing public discussion are more sophisticated, such as Microsoft recently sending Vista-loaded laptops to several popular tech bloggers.

Of course, this is nothing new to the Web. Read or rent "The Devil Wears Prada" sometime. Or come with me to a theme park attraction debut and let me point out the magazine writers and broadcast "personalities" who are there on the parks' dime.

I care deeply about opinion journalism. The public needs reporters who have the freedom and the skill to draw the appropriate conclusion from the information they gather. We, as a profession, shouldn't always have to leave it to the reader to decide who is lying. But too many news publishers find it cheaper and easier to run industry-funded propaganda than to pay their own reporters to find the truth. And for many writers, the easiest way to stay employed is to attach themselves to the teat of a well-funded interest.

From Robert Niles on February 28, 2007 at 11:23 AM

FWIW, here's another pay-for-play example, this time on The Politico, the new politics site run by a couple of ex-WaPo scribes.

From Robert Niles on March 9, 2007 at 11:36 AM

The LA Times provides a slew of examples this morning, but of the lower-stakes variety. The Times report looks at PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews, among other websites that pay bloggers a few bucks when they favorably name check a client in a post.

I think the Times story misses the reason behind this approach , however. Unlike the traditional pay-for-play punditry, there's not much return on investment reaching the audience for these bloggers. These shills typically measure their readership in the dozens, not the thousands. A firm would be throwing its money away if all it was getting was exposure to these tiny audiences.

Yes, there is the chance that something one of these bloggers writes could go viral. But, again, I think playing the lottery, or at least half-informed sports betting, provides a better long-term investment.

Ultimately, the real value in these payments lies in search engine optimization. Google and other search engines reward sites with plenty of inbound links, as those are the sites which show up highest in searches for relevant terms. And paying dozens of bloggers to write about your product is a highly effective way to get those links, quickly.

A slew of links can also help a new site gain visibility on social networking on blog tracking services, as well.

Yes, Google's tweaked its algorithm to minimize the benefits of link buying. And its been known to toss offenders from its search results as well. But link buying remains a highly effective way to "game the system" and build buzz for a new product. Not from the primary sources -- the bought links -- but from the secondary result of greater search engine relevancy and social networking buzz.