One of the biggest scandals of our time is how media outlets routinely ignore the provenance of sock puppetry.
After all, where you stand depends on where you sit. Where you sit depends a lot on who’s paying your heating bills. It’s a natural question for people to ask, one the media has a duty to answer.
Sock puppets, as you know (or should), are sources that are owned by a company or interest on whose behalf they are speaking, and whose link to them they are hiding.
Sometimes news outlets don’t disclose these conflicts because they want to maintain the source. Sometimes they fear losing advertising from the hand controlling the puppet Sometimes they do it because they (0r their publishers) are in philosophical agreement with the source, or the hand.
Whatever the motives, it’s routine. But in an age of Open Source politics and Internet values, with bloggers who can spot such puppets a mile away (and have every motive to blow the whistle) this trick isn’t working so well.
Let me give you an example:
In North Carolina, the so-called John Locke Foundation has a long history as a source for news and analysis. They are, in fact, the property of a man named Art Pope.
Pope controls a retail chain called Variety Stores in Raleigh. He considers himself a kingmaker within the Republican Party. Those who dare scorn his far-right dictates are dubbed RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). This year, in fact, Pope has been engaged in a little Jihad against the RINOs, taking down a number who dared cooperate with their Democratic colleagues.
Now Pope has a right to do all of this. But there is also an obligation on the part of the media to detail what is going on, and to reference it each time the Sock Puppet opens its mouth.
This they haven’t done.
It has fallen to Democratic blogs like BlueNC to hammer the point of Pope home. This they have done. And as other bloggers, not only in North Carolina but around the country, take on the challenge of exposing this link, the Locke Foundation will lose credibility, which is essentially what Sock Puppets (by their nature) are stealing.
Now Pope is a smart man, who understands the power of the new medium. In fact, he plans to have a blogfest of his own next month, a week before a major blogging conference in Greensboro called ConvergeSouth.
The challenge then becomes to spread the word that everyone who attends this so-called FreedomNet is, like the Locke Foundation, a Sock Puppet of Art Pope. North Carolinians may like a King Pope, but if they’re to select one they need to do it with their eyes wide open.
The media won’t report this story. The blogosphere will. And thus the voters will hear it.
Call it Open Source Politics in action.
