During the presidential campaign, the DailyKos received as many as 1 million hits daily.

The deal was revealed earlier this week by Zephyr Teachout, the former head of Internet outreach for the Dean campaign, on her own Web log, Zonkette.

While Armstrong and Zuniga never expressly committed to support Dean in exchange for the cash, Teachout explained that favorable coverage "was very clearly, internally, our goal."

While Mr. Williams' arrangement was relatively unparalleled in GOP circles, the Democratic Party has a long history of cozying up to journalists, trading favors and bankrolling media operations in the expectation of positive media coverage.

As NewsMax recounted yesterday, celebrated liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz confessed to the "Today" show last January that his network was bankrolled by $2 million in donations from Democrats.

Al Franken's Air America radio network has a similar financial arrangement with party fat cats.

Liberal Democrat donor Sheldon Drobny founded Franken's network, sold it and then helped raise money when the original management was ousted.

Sometimes the cozy relationship has gotten Democrat-leaning media outlets into trouble.

In July 1999, for instance, Boston's taxpayer-funded TV station, WGBH, was caught red-handed sharing its donor lists with the Democratic National Committee. "The practice of swapping names was discovered when The Boston Globe reported that Sam Black, a 4-year-old boy who watches public TV's 'Barney,' had been receiving mail from the DNC," the Associated Press reported at the time.

The scandal metastasized, implicating dozens of PBS outlets in the illicit arrangement - including at least one instance of a direct cash payment.

"In February, [1999] the DNC asked [WGBH] for an additional 20,000 names in exchange for the names of 9,800 Democratic donors and $900," the AP said.

In a 1994 case that received far less attention, two Republican congressmen complained that senior Clinton administration official Susan Brophy had promised that the Boston Globe's Thomas Oliphant would write favorable columns about them if they voted for Clinton's crime bill.

"She said if I voted yes, she would request Oliphant to write something favorable about me," Republican Peter Torkildsen told the Boston Herald. "I was a little caught off guard."

Torkildsen's GOP colleague, Peter Blute, said Brophy had made a "similar" pitch to him.

"She said [the White House] could be helpful with the regional press in Boston," Blute told the Herald. "She mentioned the Globe and she mentioned Oliphant."

Mr. Oliphant angrily denied that he had agreed to help the White House by trading his column for House votes. "Nothing I write or have ever written is on anybody else's authority but my own, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a scumbag," he told the Herald.

But after Blute supported the Clinton legislation, the Globe scribe praised him in print. Torkildsen's vote against the bill was denounced in a separate Oliphant column as a "smarmy move."

Editor's note: