RedCounty.com CEO Chip Hanlon posted about a discovery he made regarding the Steve Poizner for Governor campaign’s approach to our blog, RedCounty.com:
Someone should tell Steve Poizner that Red County would have covered his Gubernatorial campaign for free.
You see, I’ve recently learned something which, in retrospect, might not come as a complete shock to all our readers given the nature of his content: I have it in writing that the Poizner camp has been secretly paying one of our writers, “Sgt. York,” for favorable coverage all year long.
Now, to be fair, the Poizner camp wasn’t paying him directly. Instead, they were paying a “consultant,” and that person was paying our now-former writer. But it is a fact that the person was paying York explicitly for pro-Poizner, anti-Whitman commentaries, articles specifically to be written on RedCounty.com.
I disclose this publicly here to preserve the credibility of this site and its other hard working writers, and because this is a direct violation of our internal policies; any contributor writing on behalf of a paying client must simply disclose that relationship—not too difficult.
You can read the rest of the post here.
December 9th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Oh My! What’s the beef!
Flash Report is riddled with puff pieces promoting moderates, RINOS and born again Democrats….
Poizner is most likely punchy from the Whitman advertising barrage…let the guy get his legs!
Paying a blogger is not new..its advertising ala the new age of misinformation, deception and slight of hand.
Puff pieces are so prevelant today, for cubicle workers think they are gospel; put out any text message, email or blog and the young and dumb will believe, for examples, the Titanic arrives in New York harbor on Friday or Arnold really did “blow up the boxes”.
December 9th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Dumb, but typical of consultants nowadays who watch too many movies and come up with crackpot ideas about how campaigns are really run. Many years ago I worked on an competitive Assembly race when I found out from a college buddy that the other side had placed a spy in our ranks who volunteered on one of our phone banks.
I breathlessly reported this to the consultant who was running the campaign and his only question was if the person was actually making the phone calls he was supposed to make. Told that he was, the consultant said, “well in that case let him stay. Any knowledge he picks up will not be worth as much as the help he gives us in getting our message out to the voters.”
The longer I have worked in politics, the more I have realized that is the right attitude. Clearly Steve Poizner could have gotten volunteers to monitor the blogs if that was important to his campaign and to put out attacks on the other side if they really wanted to go that way. But instead someone whom I would guess was a very lower level consultant tries to be clever and does something stupid and useless.