Amusing that a dude so obsessed with the right-wing canard of the liberal media would found a "non-partisan" blogging organization that exists solely to suck up to the established press, right? Anyway, back in 2004, Cox sent this email to 9 TOP BLOGGERS inviting them to become members of his new club. The new club's purpose was "to promote its members." That was really about it. It was also about a little logo you could display on your site.

I envision three types of memberships..."FOUNDING MEMBER", "MEMBER", "HONRARY MEMBER". The MBAA Logo will indicate one of the three types. Obviously this is your only chance to get what I expect will be a coveted FOUNDING MEMBER logo.

Man, we are so disappointed that we missed that boat. We all know how much cred a FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE MBA badge gets you these days.

And now, over the years, as those founding members accidentally let their memberships lapse, the MBA has grown into Robert Cox's personal publicity organ. Mainstream media need someone to show up on TV and represent bloggers? Call Cox! He's got a prestigious title from a real-sounding organization, and that looks way better on an identifying chyron than some weird U.R.L.. Cox has made the most of it, as an investigation by Teresa at Making Light reveals. He doesn't blog very much or very well, but he shows up at every single conference foolish enough to invite him. And he's turned his right-leaning advocacy group into a money-maker!

He began charging dues shortly after he got some big dogs to sign up for free (see? we're legitimate!).

And so his group, initially founded to professionalize and legitimize bloggers, now exits to enrich Robert Cox and make him the Official Face of Mainstream Blogging for old media. And he's using his friendship with the print press to put together a list of guidelines we must follow if we wish to quote the Associated Press without getting sued.

Oh, and Cox also guards his Wikipedia entry as if it was his child. So go have fun!

AP to negotiate with sham “Media Bloggers Association” [Making Light]

David Seamon, expert in self-publicity and former Gawker Media intern, found Cox's blog itself to be suspect.

Fishy: So some of this guy's posts receive 0 comments, while others get 81,406 user comments — but you can't view any of them unless you log in. I honestly have trouble believing his blog gets that much traffic, especially considering there are no pics and the whole thing reads like the starter text included with a blog template. (For comparison's sake, the most popular story on PerezHilton.com at the moment has 142 comments...)

3. What's totally even weirder: when you try to create a login so you can view his 81,000+ comments, it doesn't let you...

"Thanks for signing up for our email list. We'll contact you once registration is open. We hope that will be sometime in August and hopefully no later than 9/1/08."

Seaman suggests the entire MBA is just an excuse to sell scared bloggers useless liability insurance. Commenter Triborough agrees!

They do not list any physical location (i.e. street address), the whois info for their domain appears to be a private registration, in the e-mail the phone number is Westchester, but the fax is Arizona (big red flag). Part of me thinks it could be a front group for AP to get money.

This is the group that the blogger behind Drudge Retort turned to when faced with legal threats from the Associated Press. AP backed down, but who knows what Cox and his MBA got from the blogger. And now this group is supposedly in negotiations with the AP to issue blogging guidelines that most likely will be stricter than copyright law even calls for.

If we suspected anyone was maybe going to follow those rules, we'd be worried!

Anyway, Roger, if you have any response to all this, just put it on your blog, and then we'll read it and make fun of it again. That's how it works.

Update: We forgot about the AP's friendly history with Cox!

Media Bloggers Association head Robert Cox gets along just swimmingly with the wire service. They worked together in early 2007 to cover the Scooter Libby trial and Cox was thrilled at the opportunity. "This is a great step forward in the relationship between news bloggers and the mainstream media," Cox said the AP's decision to deign to allow bloggers to get press passes.

In return, Cox promised to keep bloggers in line! “This is not the time to write a post titled ‘Dick Cheney is a [expletive deleted].’ We sought to address [the AP’s concerns] by saying we have a vetted membership of bloggers who’ve agreed to ascribe to certain ideals of what they’re trying to do. [The AP] has the kind of accountability that they want. I’m not going to control what the blogger writes, but if they get way out of line and embarrass the AP, they can be pulled from the feed.”

Goddammit Cox this is the time to write a post titled "Dick Cheney is a [expletive deleted]." If we can't do that, then what is the point of blogging?

(Thanks, it takes a train to cry, for reminding us.)

Robert Cox, President of the M.B.A., we admire your response—it's very bloggy!—but Ryan put that story up at 12 a.m.! Did you really want a call in the middle of the night asking you to confirm whether or not your organization was opaque and your legitimacy self-defined?

Cox's pissy blog post is totally great, actually, from calling Ryan "some kid" to calling us all lazy. (Once again, blogging—if it's not stolen and reposted from the AP, we don't pay attention!) "I am sure," Cox writes, "this is not nearly as exciting as covering the latest sex scandal in Washington [...? –ed] so that a Gawker blogger would be unaware of our efforts is hardly a surprise."

Sorry Robert! We're too busy covering that famous Washington sex scandal everyone is talking about to call people before we make fun of them. We hope those negotiations with the Associated Press go well, and we look forward to flat-out ignoring whatever rules you guys come up with.