Political Blogger Blasted For Defending State Budget While Taking in Hundreds of Thousands in Tax Money

After trying to paint Illinois as on stronger footing than the public perceives it, gossip site editor Rich Miller was blasted by a media watchdog website for failing to disclose the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has received from Illinois for his political gossip.

Rich Miller, Owner of CaptiolFax.com, has accepted a quarter of a million dollars from the state government for his blog since 2005.

Miller, owner of CapitolFax, a political gossip blog based out of Springfield, wrote a column praising Gov. Pat Quinn for the work done over the past several years since taking office. Miller claimed the state is on strong footing because of Quinn, despite the perception to the contrary by many media outlets and the public.

After the column’s release on April 11, Miller found himself on the wrong end of Illinois Mirror editor Eric Kohn, who took the columnist to task. After quoting a paragraph where Miller defends Quinn’s financial actions, saying there was not enough money to handle the Great Recession and also deal with the state pension obligations and not enough to cut out of the budget without doing “great harm,” Kohn then pointed out a glaring area where he felt Miller overlooked; the thousands of dollars Illinois has paid Miller every year for his gossip.

So, Rich Miller can’t find any government spending to cut, eh? I think I might have found a place to start:

In FY2013, Rich Miller’s Ahead of Our Time Publishing received $44,000 (NOTE: The $44,000 was actually $19,900 in FY2012, $41,000 in FY2013 and $34,000 in the current fiscal year) in taxpayer money for subscriptions to CapitolFax.

That’s right, your money is paying for politicos and government functionaries to read his political gossip. For some context, Illinois per capita income is $29,519, and the median household income is $56,853.

Now, of course, cutting $41k in spending isn’t going to balance the budget or fix our pension crisis. But just remember that when you hear Rich Miller saying that we can’t cut spending without doing great harm, he’s talking — at least in part — about the harm that would come to his bank account.

Ahead of Our Time Publishing is the company owned by Miller that publishes the daily political gossip on his website, CaptiolFax.com. Subscribers pay an annual $500 fee for access to “insider” portions and the daily email that contains more than what is publicly available. Since 2005, Miller’s blog has received more than a quarter of a million dollars from Illinois’ government offices and agencies.

After the Illinois Mirror’s story went public Miller attempted to defend his company’s tax-funded revenue by comparing his costs to other information sources.

“I do find it richly ironic that a supposedly pro-business blogger would be attacking a business owner’s relative success. I say ‘relative’ because I ran the numbers for the Chicago Tribune and came up with $165,502.49 spent by the state in Fiscal Year 2013 with that company,” Miller said to a separate political website.

That didn’t slow Kohn’s rhetoric, though, as he continued to blast Miller for comparing his blog to the Tribune, one of the nation’s largest newspapers, as well as continuing to accept money from Illinois.

“I find it pretty rich that Rich Miller can’t distinguish the difference between the two,” Kohn wrote. “He runs a political gossip site. The Chicago Tribune is a broad-based news publisher. Equating the two is wildly disingenuous.

“But this also misses the bigger point: the State of Illinois is broke. Actually, we’re beyond broke. We’re drowning in a vast ocean of red ink. The state should no more be spending $165k on subscriptions to the Chicago Tribune (especially when you can read it for free online) than they should be spending $100k over three years on subscriptions to political gossip. We just simply don’t have the money.”

Miller has yet to respond publicly about Kohn’s latest remarks. 

(Full Disclosure: The author of this piece has previously worked with Eric Kohn in a different capacity.)

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Justin Shimko

Justin Shimko is an award-winning writer and political analyst. He began as a reporter in his college days at the University of Oklahoma, writing for The Oklahoma Daily (rated as one of the best collegiate newspapers in the nation) and The Oklahoman, the statewide newspaper, winning awards from the CSPA and the Society of Professional Journalists. He later moved on to research and writing work for a number of political campaigns. His email is [email protected]

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