It’s going to be an unsettling day for the Ruling Class in Washington, DC. One of the little tricks that keeps the Beltway media-special interest alliance prosperously spinning along has been exposed to the light of day by Washington Post blogger Eric Wemple. In a long piece devoted to Politico’s Mike Allen, Wemple chronicles the confluence of advertising and journalism via what a practice called “native advertising,” inserting material that looks like it could be an ordinary item written by a journalist, but which actually is paid advertising.  Wemple describes native advertising as “the tricks that publishers deploy to elide the domains of journalism and advertising.” To illustrate the practice, Wemple challenges readers to decide which of the following items from Allen’s Daily email “Playbook” column are advertising and which are written by Allen as “journalism”: 1) “The economy is not growing...(Read Full Post)