Blogger Influence Raises Ethical Questions
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer
When Jerome Armstrong began consulting
for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign,
he thought the ethical thing to do was to suspend the Web journal where he
opined on politics.
But to suggest others do the same with
their journals, otherwise known as blogs? No way.
"If I'm getting paid by a client,
I don't blog about it. That's my personal set of
standards," Armstrong said.
"I'm not going to hold anybody else to my personal standards. I'm not
going to make that universal."
The growing influence of blogs such as his is raising questions
about whether they are becoming a new form of journalism
and in need of more formal ethical guidelines or codes of conduct.
According to the Pew Internet and American
Life Project,
27 percent of adults who go online in the
And blogs have greater impact because their readers
tend to be policy makers
and other influencers of public opinion, media experts say.
So far, many bloggers
resist any notion of ethical standards,
saying individuals ought to decide what's right for them.
After all, they say, blog topics range from trying to sway your presidential vote
to simply talking about the day's lunch.
Blogging is more like a conversation,
and "you can't develop a code of ethics for conversations," said
David Weinberger,
a prominent blogger and research fellow at Harvard's
"A conversation with your best
friend would become stilted and alienating."
Others, however, have pushed written guidelines.
Jonathan
Dube, managing producer at MSNBC.com and publisher of
CyberJournalist.net,
modified the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics and urged
fellow bloggers to adopt it.
The principles: Be honest
and fair. Minimize harm. Be accountable.
Longtime blogger
Rebecca Blood circulated guidelines that call for disclosing any conflicts of
interest,
publicly correcting any misinformation and linking to any source materials referenced
in postings.
"It
seems pretty clear to me that having some kind of standard
contributes
to an individual blogger's own credibility," she
said.
Yet Blood knows of fewer than 10 bloggers who have adopted her guidelines by linking to the
document.
How bloggers handle matters of ethics and disclosure
vary greatly.
While Armstrong suspended his blog, a partner in his political consulting firm,
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga,
kept his going and instead posted a disclosure about the payment.
The Dean campaign had paid the pair $3,000 a month for technical consulting
services.
Others saw no need to disclose at all.
In
knew
he was a paid consultant to John Thune's Senate campaign,
but Lauck didn't believe he had to post any "flashing
banner" on his site.
He said that unlike mainstream news
organization, blogs like his never claim to be
objective,
and anyone reading a few posts would quickly know he
was pro-Thune — with or without disclosure.
Beyond politics, marketers have turned
to blogs as well.
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A company called Marqui
is paying about 20 bloggers
$800 a month to write about the company and its products for managing marketing
campaigns.
Marqui
says negative reviews are OK, and bloggers are
permitted to disclose the payments.
Dr. Pepper/Seven Up Inc. took a similar
tactic when it launched a new flavored milk drink called Raging Cow.
Many news organizations have formal
guidelines separating editorial and business operations,
and journalism schools and
professional societies try to teach good practices.
Bloggers, though, tend to shudder at being
called journalists, even as lines between the two blur.
When Apple Computer Inc. got court
orders allowing it to subpoena bloggers
for the identities of
people who had leaked company secrets,
two of the bloggers responded by claiming they were entitled
to protect confidential
sources the way traditional journalists do.
And in
explored the evolution of blogging and journalism and the influences of one on the
other.
Many bloggers
believe standards of practices are inevitable, even if they aren't something
formalized in writing.
Zephyr
Teachout, who was Dean's director of online organizing,
likens it to crafting
a constitution —
not necessarily
written as a formal code of conduct,
but as a
set of accepted norms.
"Do
you do it through a code of ethics?
Do you do it by just talking to
a lot of people about it? I don't know," she said.
Teachout has been thinking about such issues
for about a year, she said, and is "constantly changing my mind."
"Now, to some degree, bloggers are going
through the same stages
that professional journalism went
through at the beginning of the 20th century,"
said Jay Rosen, a blogger
and professor of journalism at New York University.
That was when newspapers started becoming independent and severed ties with
political parties.
In some sense, bloggers
already have informally adopted norms
that go beyond what traditional
journalists do, Rosen said.
For instance, bloggers who don't link to source
materials aren't taken seriously,
while traditional news
organizations have no such policies.
Dan
Gillmor, a former
newspaper columnist now studying citizen-driven journalism through blogging,
said bloggers who want an audience will voluntarily
adopt principles of fairness, thoroughness, accuracy and transparency.
"No one's bound by these rules," Gillmor said, "but I think some norms will emerge for people
who want to be taken seriously."