There’s an amusing public spat over at TechCrunch in a comment thread between Trent Kang, founder of CreamAid, and Michael Arrington that highlights the hypocrisy of the blogosphere elite when they worry out loud about the pernicious effects of the emerging pay for blogging models. Arrington likens such pay to payola in the music biz that the FCC investigated and censured a while back.

As Arrington criticizes the payola for the masses, the meta-story of his TC posts conveniently illustrates the corrosive influence of money at the top of the blogosphere. While he takes great pains to disclose his sponsor relationships and even makes a show of criticizing their products and services, it is his behavior not disclosure that deserves scrutiny.

Three new purveyors of blogging payola emerged at roughly the same time and Trent Kang takes issue with the sequence of their coverage at TechCrunch. Kang claims CreamAid was first on the scene, and despite their efforts couldn’t get attention at TC, while PayPerPost came later and took pole position. Adding injury to insult, CreamAid was covered finally but as second act to ReviewMe, a subsidiary of one of TC’s sponsors, Text-Link-Ads.

Arrington’s reply to Kang’s complaint was the brush off “Trent - My suggestion is to work on your website messaging.”

Perhaps Arrington meant "massaging." Whatever the flaws in Kang's messaging, lots of other blogs clearly understood CreamAid's mission. Postbubble wrote a comprehensive story on CreamAid's business and model on August 1, 2006, and so did Mashable the next day. Following CreamAid’s September 28th public launch, sites not receiving sponsorship from Text-Link-Ads wrote full stories. Again, TC didn't cover CreamAid until ReviewMe's later launch. Would TC have put a little more oomph into “understanding” CreamAid had Kang shelled out for sponsorship?

We don’t totally blame Arrington. Merit ranks below politics and money. Look at the mismanagement during Katrina. To use Arrington's own payola example, who runs the FCC? Political appointees. Their appointers and their legislative overseers are all mostly beneficiaries of relationships and influence money. How did Michael Powell, injured tank commander serving in Germany, get from the recovery ward to FCC chairmanship? Powell is a smart guy, but don’t tell us he did it purely on merit alone. Likewise, we understand that getting attention on TC is achieved by factors of which merit is only one of many. All the levers of influence in politics are at work there too. Michael, editorial discretion is your perogative, but don’t be sanctimonious about payola and worrisome about its undermining of credibility when money clearly influences your own blogging.