We don't read political blogs (they never write about pretty things!), so we didn't notice that political blogger Daily Kos had a disclosure at the top of his site stating that he was working for the Dean presidential campaign. Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that Markos Zuniga Of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD got paid $3k a month for four months of work with Dean s army:

Zephyr Teachout, the former head of Internet outreach for Mr. Dean's campaign, made the disclosure earlier this week in her own Web log, Zonkette. She said "to be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment — but it was very clearly, internally, our goal." The hiring of the consultants was noted in several publications at the time.

Wait, why the hell is she named Zephyr? And Zonkette, that sounds familiar... But we digress. To the Wall Street Journal, this is big news, despite the press coverage back when it this was an actual story. So swallow your sense of timeliness.

With the growing importance of blogs — short for Web logs — Ms. Teachout said she thinks bloggers need to rethink their attitudes toward ethics.

Oh, so THAT'S what "blog" stands for. Got it. But what's an "ethic"? And what's the problem here?
Dean Campaign Made Payment To Two Bloggers [WSJ]

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