Yesterday it was announced that Patrick Hynes of Ankle Biting Pundits would be retained by Straight Talk America, John McCain’s PAC, for political work with New Media. It took the conservative blogosphere less than 24 hours to rightly criticize Hynes for not disclosing his relationship with McCain’s PAC earlier than he did.

Jim Geraghty at TKS points out that the announcement came on July 25 but Hynes had been involved with the PAC for some time before that and had posted numerous times in favor or defense of McCain on his blog. Mark Tapscott says “rule number 1″ for bloggers should be disclosure of financial relationships.

I think Hynes is handling the whole thing quite well…see his mea culpa here.

This just goes to show that on the right side of the blogosphere, credibility, transparency and full disclosure are cherished values.

UPDATE: Danny Glover has some good observations here.  In reference to my point above about cherished values, Glover wonders “how cherished those values really are when the transparency and full disclosure come after bad publicity.” Point taken…but my point was more in reference to the way in which the conservative side of the blogosphere policed itself within 24 hours. The posts by Geraghty, Tapscott and others  are indicative of a zero tolerance policy that exists in the conservative blogging community. To me, that is a commendable policy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under blogosphere, conservatives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.