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By JOCELYNE
ZABLIT
Bloggers go off their blocks
WASHINGTON: A controversy which has
flared over two bloggers working for the campaign of US
presidential hopeful John Edwards has highlighted the pitfalls
facing candidates as they embrace the Web to reach voters.
The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, resigned
following outrage over allegedly anti-Catholic rhetoric they had
posted on their own blogs before they joined the Edwards campaign
last month.
The 350,000-strong Catholic League, a conservative religious
group, had demanded that Edwards fire the two women and threatened
to unleash a public relations blitz against his campaign.
Marcotte and McEwan said though Edwards, a Democrat, did not ask
them to step down, they had decided to resign to spare his
campaign any further undue criticism.
Political commentators and experts said the incident illustrates
the treacherous terrain facing candidates as they redefine their
political strategies to reach younger and tech-savvy voters.
“This probably is the year we learn and write new rules about how
to integrate all of these new interactive instant media technology
such as blogs, Facebook or YouTube into campaigns and elections,”
David Perlmutter, a professor and associate dean of graduate
studies at the University of Kansas school of journalism, told AFP.
“Right now, a lot of people are experimenting and speculating and
really just making stuff up as they go along but we’re going to
learn some lessons ... because nobody has written the rule book
yet,” Perlmutter, author of “Blogwars: The New Political
Battleground”, added.
He said the Edwards flap will likely prompt campaign managers to
be more aggressive in sifting through bloggers’ backgrounds to dig
up anything that might be fodder for controversy.
“Everybody who is running for everything is going to ask their
campaign manager: ‘Hey, you checked these guys out, right?’” he
said.
The incident will also force politicians to come to terms with the
pitfalls involved in recruiting veteran bloggers, whose past
off-the-cuff, uncensored remarks on the blogosphere can come back
to haunt them in the real world of politics.
“It’s pretty clear that we are still trying to work out a basic
set of rules and norms about how bloggers intersect with the
political and media world,” Lee Rainie, director of the Pew
Internet and American Life Project, said.
“For a long time in America, the wall between being an independent
reporter and being a commentator and an activist has been pretty
clear,” he added. “But it’s not so clear in the age of blogging.”
In the case of Marcotte and McEwan, the comments that landed both
in hot water were made before they were hired by the Edwards
campaign in January.
Marcotte on her Pandagon site had criticised the church’s
opposition to birth control, which she said forces women “to bear
more tithing Catholics”.
McEwan for her part had referred to President George W Bush’s
“wingnut Christofacist base” on the Shakespeare’s Sister blog.
The blog entries and other comments they had posted earned them
the wrath of Catholic League president William Donohue who
described them as “anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots”.
Rainie said the episode is unlikely to muzzle bloggers but will
serve as a cautionary tale to those jumping into the political
arena that all is fair game.
“So many relationships, even benign relationships, can be
exploited under the wrong circumstances, or with innuendo, winks
and nods,” he said.
“And everybody needs to be more careful and more transparent about
these things in an environment where so much of people’s
backgrounds can now be Googled.” — AFP
 
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