@jbtaylor on tech

As I mentioned yesterday, the Washington Post's Cecilia Kang has a must read story and blog post out about how AT&T has showered politicians and groups of all types with cash contributions.

Lo and behold, these same politicians and groups are backing AT&T's bid to takeover T-Mobile.

Kang writes:

"We went through some of these supporters and found it’s just plain hard to find politicians or organizations that haven’t received some financial support from AT&T over the years."

This is the kind of Washington, D.C. Inside-the-Beltway politics as usual that disgusts the rest of America. AT&T is banking that reporters covering this story won't do the digging that Kang has done.

What I am urging media to do is to ask questions to uncover who is working for whom before they act on what a source tells them.

Consider the recent opinion pieces in Politico and Roll Call backing AT&T.

Politico ran a pro-AT&T piece by former FCC commissioner Henry Rivera which never disclosed that Rivera's law firm, Wiley Rein, is representing Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile USA.

A few days later, Roll Call ran a pro-AT&T opinion piece by former Congressman Rich Boucher which never disclosed that his employer, Sidley Austin, represents AT&T. Furthermore, the Internet Innovation Alliance of which Boucher is an honorary co-chair is an AT&T-funded outfit.

Suppose Rivera was still an FCC member and Boucher still represented Virginia in Congress (something I personally wish was the case, BTW), would either man still come out in support of AT&T?

I'm assuming they would.

But readers of Roll Call and Politico were never told of the financial ties between AT&T and the two gentlemen.

On May 18, Roll Call ran a piece about Boucher's new job at Sidley Austin. Would it have been that hard for the opinion page to read the news story which Roll Call's Kate Ackley had reported less than two weeks earlier?

A quick check of Boucher's Open Secrets profile discloses that between the 1998 and 2010 elections, the former Congressman's campaign committee received $110,500 in campaign cash from AT&T and all the competitors it's gobbled up during that time.

Here's the thing, the Internet makes this really easy to do. AT&T is banking on reporters not taking the time to investigates these ties.

My expectation is that neither Politico nor Roll Call will make this mistake again. Politico, to its credit ran a piece yesterday which looked into AT&T's financial ties to lawmakers.

There should be more of this type of reporting in my personal view.

With disclosure of financial ties, the public can decide for itself what is being said and what the motivations are behind the message.

I just got back from my very first South by Southwest. I was there for most of SXSW Interactive and one night of SXSW Music. I've been reading the news and blog coverage from Austin and this photo from the Washington Post caught my eye.

While it was taken during the Music Week (after all the bloggers from SXSWi had gone home) I have to agree with the sentiment.

There's a HUGE amount of ego among some in the blogosphere -- we ran into some of that last Monday at a karaoke party Sprint co-sponsored. But my experience in Austin was a lot like my experience dealing with people who work in politics here in DC. The people who really are important, don't act like it; that kind of behavior usually comes from someone who isn't a big deal at all.

I'd say, generally speaking, there's an inverse relationship between someone's importance and how important they act.

But that's just me.