Conservatives Do Not Understand Capitalism
Jane Hamsher runs it down for the wingnut-welfare crowd:
Several years ago, in response to the formation of “Pajamas Media,” I coined the phrase wingnut welfare. Though it became applied more broadly over time, I was trying to succinctly describe the transactional relationship between the conservative infrastructure and right wing bloggers, who were basically being paid regardless of merit to spread propaganda…
During the Bush years, the right wing was playing a zero sum game, and they thought we were, too. Support “your guy” when he’s in the White House, oppose “their guy” when he’s not. To be sure, there are many in the Democratic camp willing to forgive things in the Obama Administration they excoriated George Bush for, though I’m not sure I’d call them the “left.” Regardless, go over to Daily Kos right now — those aren’t the dominant voices on the liberal side of the blogosphere….
So, when Greg Sargent wrote yesterday about liberals bloggers upset because liberal interest groups weren’t factoring us in their advertising budgets or thinking about participating in financially sustainable models, right wing bloggers thought it was an acknowledgment that we were printing propaganda and wanted to be paid for it. Because that’s very much how they operate….
Let’s try this again. Liberal blogs operate in a capitalist system. Our success depends on traffic, and we aren’t paid to print White House talking points. We get paid for advertising. Eugene Volkh, whose career as an academic he acknowledges gives him limited experience in this realm, worries about a lack of “transparency.” Here’s the transparency — you look and see the ads running on a particular site, just as you would the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
I’d like to make some very clear distinctions about right and left right now. Even in their current battered, demoralized state, the right wing has ALWAYS supported their writers and thinkers, with fellowships, think tanks, publishing deals, and yes “were basically being paid regardless of merit to spread propaganda.” On the left, we get offered internships, minimum wage jobs knocking on doors, and little else. You know why I don’t go door to door for politicians? besides the fact that most of them are lying pigs, no one’s offering ME a post-election job, or paying for my gas, or helping me write a book? My post promoting Brett Mandel? You think he paid me for that?
So left wing bloggers have, over time, gotten used to taking care of ourselves. And now that the wingnut welfare spigot seems to have turned off with the demise of Pajamas Media, a lot of those “bloggers” are out of work.
Hamsher is also quite correct when she talks about the need for advertising revenue for blogs: asking a blogger to post a press release for free when you’re paying the New York Times $50K for an ad buy ain’t gonna put food on the table. But because wingnuts have never really had to drive traffic through the actual merits of their writing, thanks to backing by the Scaifes and Simons of the world, they don’t seem to actually grasp how a business functions.
And that’s just sad. Deeply, deeply hilariously sad.
April 9th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
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