Over on National Review’s The Corner, Master Watcher of the Left Grassroots Byron York observes:

I just saw a brief posting by firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher that sheds some light on that site’s emphasis on the Plame matter.  Defending Arianna Huffington against accusations that she places too much emphasis on celebrities, Hamsher writes that the Huffington Post and firedoglake use similar strategies to attract readers:

Do people go to the HuffPo because Geoffrey Stone is there? No, they draw big traffic because John Cusack and Alec Baldwin and Harry Shearer are there. But Arianna uses that to provide a platform for important thinkers like Geoffrey Stone who in turn have the opportunity to have greater influence and a bigger audience than they otherwise would.

We do something a bit similar. Atrios says Plame is like porn and it is. We get our big traffic from it, that’s what people love to read about. We use that big traffic to do our series on racism and war profiteering and labor that otherwise probably wouldn’t get much traffic at all. I don’t care if those posts get 10 comments, we’ll keep doing them and they can (and have) begun to impact the consciousness of the blogosphere. I think that’s the responsible thing to do.

And with that little revelation, a bit more of the world makes sense. We know what gets attention. We know why there are naked women on Page Three of British tabloids. We know why Drudge will use the siren to report that “a Washington Insider” predicted Kerry would pick Hillary as his running mate - even if (if my suspicions and sources are correct) that the “Washington Insider” was a Clinton-obsessed conservative who had no sources in the Kerry campaign and was just speculating.

And, under this theory, you need a little controversy, something shocking and attention-grabbing to get people to pay attention to the things they ought. You need cheese sauce to make the asparagus taste good. You need pictures of naked women to get people to read the Playboy articles. You need to accuse four 9/11 widows of enjoying their husbands’ deaths in order to get people to read the (hopefully) meater conservative arguments in your book.

I guess what makes that quote so revelatory to me is the ease of self-justification. Arianna can say, “I need to put this celebrity’s inane comments on my site, because it will bring in traffic, so that people read the more worthwhile postings.” Lefty bloggers can write, ”I need to put up some unproven rumor about Rove to get attention to the other things I write.” It’s all for the greater good. It’s a brief bending of our standards in order to pander to the baser tastes of the public… in order to accomplish the bigger goal of informing them of news and analysis we think is vital.

Thus, supporting the slaughter of puppies isn’t satire; it’s a marketing tool.

I don’t know whether I disdain this strategy or want to emulate it.

UPDATE: In related news, Michael Reagan is comparing the Democratic Party to the Sunni insurgents in Iraq. (Hat tip, OTB)