I still maintain Paul Schmelzer might be the closest thing to a legitimate journalist at the MNMon anymore.<\/p>\n
But I read this piece this morning<\/a> at the Monitor – which, as Erik Black noted<\/a> in confirming a years’ worth of hints and suspicions, numbers George Soros among the other “liberals with deep pockets” that underwrite the operation – and almost yakked up my skull.<\/p>\n I quote, with emphasis added:<\/p>\n The propaganda potential of blogs — noted by former Bush adviser Dan Bartlett, who said many conservative sites “regurgitate exactly<\/a>” what the administration tells them — isn’t lost on the U.S. government: in 2006 the military’s Joint Special Operations University explored the possibility of covertly paying prominent bloggers<\/strong> or training and promoting new bloggers to “pass the U.S. message.”…We shouldn’t be surprised<\/a> that the Bush administration considered paying bloggers to tout its messages, writes Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So let me get this straight – the blog that is <\/em>paid to spout propaganda (and, let’s be honest, lied about it for a year), is writing about an academic exercise where someone proposes <\/em>paying someone to spout opposing propaganda.<\/p>\n Now that’s <\/em>meta.<\/p>\n Schmelzer also notes<\/p>\n While the document doesn’t specifically name friendly blogs it could seek to channel its message, it does note the roles of conservative blogs like The Drudge Report, Little Green Footballs, Townhall.com and Free Republic forums, without listing any centrist or left-leaning blogs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So Schmelzer’s “standard of proof” is “innocent until mentioned by a couple of writers with track records, themselves, as left-leaning<\/a> shills<\/a>?”<\/p>\n We’ll keep that in mind.<\/p>\n UPDATE:\u00a0 Maybe it’s an April Fool’s joke!<\/p>\n Thats’ gotta be it.\u00a0 Not even the MNMon can talk that <\/em>far out its’ ass…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I still maintain Paul Schmelzer might be the closest thing to a legitimate journalist at the MNMon anymore. But I read this piece this morning at the Monitor – which, as Erik Black noted in confirming a years’ worth of hints and suspicions, numbers George Soros among the other “liberals with deep pockets” that underwrite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}