Ground Game

A few problems today with an otherwise pedestrian article by the Washington Times' Stephen Dinan on how John McCain's outreach to conservative bloggers resulted in a "respectful truce" with McCain's campaign. I agree with the article's thesis, but it has at least one notable flaw: proper identification of his blogger sources.

Buried near the bottom of the piece, Dinan notes how he was unable to get a response from either the Clinton or Obama campaigns on their web outreach efforts. Dinan instead dedicates the last four graphs of his story to Jerome Armstrong, the "godfather" of liberal blogs and curator of MyDD.com. Armstrong is given space to note his views that team Clinton has done a better job of reaching out to bloggers, and Dinan chimes in with a few negative quips about Obama's relationship with bloggers:

Neither Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton nor Sen. Barack Obama's campaigns returned calls about their Web outreach, though Jerome Armstrong, a liberal blogger at MyDD.com, said Mr. McCain's regular outreach tops anything the two Democrats are doing, and he said it's an approach he would recommend to any candidate.

Mr. Armstrong said Mrs. Clinton is ahead of Mr. Obama in her outreach, inviting bloggers onto regular press briefing calls with traditional reporters. He also said her blogger, Peter Daou, pitches ideas to bloggers in the same way press secretaries pitch stories to reporters, and Mr. Daou produces blog clippings in the same way most campaigns produce clip books of newspaper articles.

As for Mr. Obama, he said the Illinois senator "didn't do enough to reach out to his potential allies in the blogosphere and integrate them into the campaign." Now, when he runs into trouble, they are slower to rally to his defense.

And last month, Mr. Obama told reporters on his campaign plane he doesn't read blogs — something they took note of.

What Dinan doesn't tell his readers is that Armstrong is a Clinton supporter and that his website recently was feuding with his co-author Markos Moulitsas' web home, DailyKos, over allegations that the Kossacks are too overtly pro-Obama. Armstrong knows his politics and certainly merits being called upon as a source. He also isn't so far biased as to be considered a Clinton mouthpiece, but his views have been called into some question by some progressive bloggers. This sort of thing can be found in a 30 second Google search and almost certainly merited a citation in the story.

Dinan also fails to identify Matt Lewis and Ed Morrissey as conservative bloggers. Armstrong, however, is identified  as "liberal." This may ultimately be a minor quibble, but I have to believe proper vetting and identification of Armstrong would have taken place if he were a political consultant or traditional media source.

Armstrong discusses his Clinton support to George Washington University students here:




* Disclaimer: I used to work at the Washington Times as a national political reporter and often wrote on the efforts of conservatives to play catch-up in the world of web 2.0.