Kos the New Armstrong Williams?

Not at all. Armstrong Williams was paid through taxpayer dollars to sell the Administration's terrible No Child Left Behind Act, possibly infringing upon all sorts of anti-propaganda laws and definitely kicking the mangled corpse known as journalistic ethics repeatedly. Berkeley-based Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos fully disclosed his relationship with the Dean campaign on his site and in the media early last year.

What's turning out to be the real story in all this is the idiocy of the two Wall Street Journal reporters, who apparently made up an attribution to an off-the-record quote in order to corroborate the accusations made by Zephyr Teachout [Ed. Note: We agree with Gawker -- umm, Zonkette is a tad unoriginal, no?]. Now it looks like the Journal is having their allegations thrown right back in their face, and the Columbia Journalism Review has created the new "Lipstick on a Pig" award in honor of the two young reporters.

The allegations also accused Jerome Armstrong of MyDD of breaching ethical standards, even though he had ceased blogging after signing on with the Dean campaign. Dave Pell of Electablog, who recently started The Blog Blog (instantly making postmodernist media critics wet themselves with glee), points out that this kind of active discussion and fact-checking is part of the "New News Ecosystem."

Unattributed photo from Kos' about page.