Armstrong Williams was paid $240,000 by the US Department of Education, Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) and Markos Zuniga (DailyKos) were paid by the Dean campaign…
Amazing.
Media and bloggers were paid to share views. In one case the US Government did pay Armstrong Williams and in the other, the Howard Dean campaign did the paying. Lots of companies have been paying fines and issuing apologies in cases where they collected fees that might influence their advice or comments to customers. Insurance brokers like Marsh & Mclennan , investment firms like Edward D. Jones and many others.
Hypocritical or what?
On this site, I post my affiliation to my employer , so you can filter out any bias that I may have. To avoid conflict with my employer, I have also screened out any advertisements on the sponsorship boxes on the right here, so you are never presented with my employer-sponsored ads here (sorry team, but I only want to get one paycheck from my employer).
I think that the communications equipment industry needs to come clean too. Ed Mier of Miercom recently published a report on large IP PBX in BCR. 3Com and Nortel were two obvious vendors who declined to participate.
For 3Com, there were two reasons of concern. One was the was the entry fee, which I believed was set at a level that did quite a bit more than recover costs. Another was the inappropriate weightings of the analysis to determine winners. We think that weighting architecture for large enterprises at only 15% is not enough.
Come on Ed, tell your readers who paid and who didn't…. Only then can the reader determine the suitability of the results. Besides, in this environment of credible corporate disclosure how can full disclosure be a bad thing?
UPDATED: December 15, 2008 – Here's the Brockmann & Company parial list of clients in the interest of full disclosure.
