In scrambling to hire tight T-shirted Rocketboomstress Amanda Congdon for its website, youth-hungry ABC News scrapped a vital dinosaur-media rule: Don't let paid corporate shills be reporters.

The hiring of the DIY video blogger in November might have been heralded by some as a forward-looking effort on the part of a legacy broadcaster to attract younger viewers, but as Gawker noted yesterday, Congdon has been moonlighting for the chemical giant DuPont, hosting "Better Living Through Chemistry"-style webclips on the DuPont website touting the company's amazing products. That's a huge no-no for ABC News staffers, because it naturally raises questions about how aggressively the network covers DuPont's role in, say, building up Iraq's nuclear program or its part in giving thousands of people cancer.

Luckily for ABC News, Congdon—whose prominently featured online videos include a recent Q&A with Dan Rather and a report from the SXSW Interactive Festival—is an independent contractor. "She's a unique contributor who had deals prior to working for ABC, and continues to do so," says ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider, who also stresses out that Congdon is solely responsible for the content of her videoblog segments. So ABC's normal rules and regulations don't apply to her, which is handy, considering Congdon is currently developing a pilot for HBO and recently completed a Ford-sponsored cross-country road trip.

But wait! Congdon's videoblog segments are also featured on the ABC's 24-hour digital news channel, ABC News Now, and Business Week reported when she was hired that she would "occasionally appear as a correspondent on the network's TV news broadcasts." (She hasn't yet.) Michael Clemente, the executive producer of ABC News Digital Media, told the magazine that he "would love to see her talking to [Illinois Senator] Barack Obama, new people with new products, and all sorts of things." And Congdon's segments are coproduced, at least according to her personal blog, by Jason Samuels, an ABC News senior producer.

The DuPont deal isn't doing anything to endear Congdon to ABC News staffers, who have already complained to Radar about her low traffic, cloying online persona, and snotty posts on her blog about how lame ABC News's website is.

Ironically, Congdon's costar in the ABC News online push is one of the tougher reporters around when it comes to covering DuPont. Investigative reporter Brian Ross, who runs his own Web-based I-team, has aggressively covered allegations that Teflon, a DuPont product, causes cancer and damages organs. Maybe he and Congdon need to chat.