The Left and Putting the Poor in Poor Mouthing

DC Media Girl raised an issue about how the left tends to put undue reliance on non paid workers to "get the message out". And she's absolutely correct.

Think of organizations like "Concerned Women for America" and "Focus on the Family" and the Family Research Council. They have extremely well-paid - and dramatically underinformed and blatantly misinformed and misinforming - sources out there all the time. When the MSM even bothers to feature a dissenting opinion, they grab someone who isn't in the know.

Dean during his campaign was smart enough to form a strategic alliance with a fairly small number of centrist and left of center bloggers. But except for the nice things tossed at the same group of people all the time - a fairly small group that you often note because these same bloggers suddenly seem to being doing European tours and flying around to meet with this person or that one - there is no centralized effort. Too much reliance goes on unpaid people who also aren't terribly well informed.

Now mind you, that does NOT mean I want to see blogs become solely the domain of paid shills by any political party. But there are ways to do this that don't turn bloggers into paid guns, while supporting efforts to get the word out. For example, outside of blogdom, I've often been hired as a consultant and analyst where I was a) privy to insider information that helped consolidate information b) could report that out as needed and c) still not let the relationship interfere with my other work. Adults can do things like that. Really!

As it currently operates, the Right is far better funded, gets an immediate bias within the media toward their point of view, and they've got the paid voices out there.