Liberal Ad Network Boots Bloggers, Threatens Advertisers

While all politics are, well, political and most conversation between various entities clinging to one ideological party or another amounts to nothing more than bickering between middle school kids trying to prove who's cooler, a situation has arisen over at the BlogAds Liberal Advertising Network that's causing a bit of bitchy buzz. Rogers Cadenhead reports he's been kicked out of the network, along with Retort, Raw Story and Smirking Chimp, by network organizers Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Chris Bowers and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD which I always thought was a blog about bra size but, surprise, actually focuses on politics.

Cadenhead reports a flamewar broke out within the group after Bowers announced he was changing the network rules which would result in the exclusion of several blogs. One might call the exclusions crying over split milk but, as Cadenhead points out, the story gets juicer and lends a peek into the "holier than thou" attitude some uber-bloggers sport. Separate from Moulitsas booting bloggers and in response to Virginia's Tim Kaine pulling an ad campaign from Steve Gillard's blog, Daily Kos' Moulitsas wrote, "We're bloggers. We'll say things that are 'controversial.' If campaigns don't think they can weather such storms, then by all means they should NOT advertise on blogs. Because every time a campaign freaks out at a blogger and pulls their ads, we're going to raise a stink about it and inevitably make that campaign look bad. So they should think long and hard before putting money into a Blogad campaign."

While there's always risk advertisers will get skewered by bloggers, as they should expect, if they act in a way that begs it, it's always amusing to watch grown men throw sand at each other as if in the sandbox at nursery school.