Jane “Money” Hamsher seems a little defensive…and continues to be really, really funny.

She opens by blasting her critics

It’s staggering just how ignorant right wing bloggers are about how the business of media works, or business in general. Which wouldn’t be so ironic if they didn’t run around thumping their chests about the virtues of “free markets” and capitalism all the time. They only understand it through their own lens of blasting propaganda, and in characteristic wingnut fashion, are shrieking j’accuse! most loudly about the things they themselves are guilty of.

…plays the authority card…

As someone who actually has a business degree and has made a career of running media businesses, I wrote this in a comment over at Talk Left:

…and then jumps right into the stupid with both feet:

The reason the New York Times is around to do “earned” media is because they make revenues off of “paid” media. Everyone understands that, it’s just how business works in a capitalist system. And if you look at an advertising campaign for Toyota or Dove or Marlboro, they devote an increasing percentage of each campaign to online advertising. So it’s not like we’re asking anyone to participate in a system that has no benefit to them as advertisers.

The problem is that groups who send us their press releases expecting “earned media” just as they do the New York Times get the same “earned media” from us that they do from the New York Times. The difference is that they aren’t factoring us into their “paid” media budgets, and like the New York Times, without that, we don’t have a sustainable business model to keep offering “earned” media. As groups increasingly depend upon us as the only news outlets covering their issues (which we do without consideration as to whether they advertise with us or not), participating in a sustainable structure is something they need to be thinking about.

Look, I don’t have a lot of time to spend writing a basic handbook on journalistic ethics, but let me briefly offer up as an example the Los Angeles Times scandal which cost a publisher his job (here’s the Wikipedia summary):

The credibility of the Times suffered greatly when it was revealed in 1999 that a revenue-sharing arrangement was in place between the Times and Staples Center in the preparation of a 168-page magazine about the opening of the sports arena. The magazine’s editors and writers were not informed of the agreement, which breached the “Chinese wall” that traditionally has separated advertising from journalistic functions at American newspapers. Publisher Mark Willes also had not prevented advertisers from pressuring reporters in other sections of the newspaper to write stories favorable to their point of view.

I can’t find Otis Chandler’s great letter blasting the Times management online, but here’s the nut graf:

His successors, he said, had been “unbelievably stupid” and caused “the most serious single threat to the future” of the paper his family had bought in 1882.

See, Jane it’s like this. Readers are smart enough to know when the media they read is whoring for its advertisers; Newspapers firewall publishing and advertising from editorial for just that reason.

But you’re explicitly blending them; you’re not promising your readers a firewall, you and Kos are putting on little black dresses and hanging out at the bar at the Intercontinental hoping to make a buck.

I doubt that you’re stupid; so either you’re so blinded by selfrighteousness that selling out suddenly becomes perfectly OK when you do it – because of your superior moral sensibilities – or you’re just ignorant.

You choose and let us all know.

–