INDReporter

Hayride publisher exposed as snake oil salesman

After a brief, failed attempt in sports media, Scott McKay refashioned himself as a soldier in the conservative movement and began making a living preying on the paranoid and the gullible.

Hayride publisher Scott McKay
Photo Illustration ... d'uh

The cold war between bloggers Lamar White Jr. and Scott McKay warmed up Tuesday when White fired a broadside at McKay’s leaky man-o-war, the S.S. Ronald Reagan. A friend of The Independent and creator of the popular Louisiana politics blog CenLamar, White writes today ostensibly about McKay’s dubious claims about web traffic at his right-wing blog The Hayride, but in the process draws back the curtain and exposes McKay as a classic huckster who earns an ill-gotten buck selling to scam artists and greedy alarmists access to his readers.

The practice has been well-documented by mainstream media: Unscrupulous “entrepreneurs” peddling everything from miracle cures to apocalypse-survival kits buy access to the mailing lists of conservative media outlets like the Hayride in order to reach paranoid, gullible people who really do believe Obama is going to declare martial law, take our guns and march us before a FEMA death panel. McKay in this case serves as a middle man and emails his subscribers directly, urging them to read the enclosed message from one of the Hayride’s “important sponsors.”

Click here to read the latest on McKay at CenLamar.

By the way, The Independent staff is not immune to McKay’s chicanery. Here’s a screen grab of a staff member’s email trash folder sorted by sender: