Little Green Footballs

Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Another Excellent Blog...

As we ponder the mystery of Bathrobe Media and how Squeaky Johnson and Roger The Dodger were able to scam so many benjamins, let us commend to you another excellent and informative blog: TruthOut Amongst its attributes, TruthOut has found a way to publish editorials by Frank Rich and others now hidden behind the pay-per-view firewall the NY Times foolishly erected. It is seriously worth a bookmark.

Now, back to the Stinking Bathrobe. It is simply unbelievable that with all the resources a few million bucks can buy, so little effort of any kind has gone into OSM/PJM. From the shoddy slapped together website (built on barely customized open-source VOPE), to the sophomoric editorial "voice" (if you can even call it that), to the fact that they haven't even bothered to update the URL, you really got to ask, WTF?

One answer: OSM/PJM was never intended to be any kind of money-making venture, supported by advertising or anything else. That's why they're not even trying.

It is simply another Republican Black Media Op, a way of funneling sustaining money to right-wing bloggers with Johnson and Simon as gravy-train paymasters. You've heard of "astro-turfing", well OSM/PJM is a Republican "Astroblog", a "Scaife" type venture, if not funded by Scaife himself. How long, one wonders, before the 70 or so bloggers currently cashing monthly checks from Chuckles and The Hat start to wonder where the money is coming from?

1 comment:

Benjamin said...

Indeed. This explains Dennis The Peasant's experience. Remember, whilst he was running around trying to build the advertising side (which was originally the core of the project), Roger and Charles quietly dropped the idea.

Why was that? Because they took the easy option presumably. Go for the astroturfing model, instead of doing the hard work building up an independent business.

Of course, it's fair enough switching from advertising to journalism. But then you actually have to do journalism - and there is not much sign of that.

Or, alternatively, become a blog aggregate site, but again that looks clumsy too.