E-Mail to CBC's “The Current” re: blogging

I haven't listened to CBC radio in so long, and now it seems to have captured my attention this morning as I stay home from work because of the snow storm.

Anyway, their news program, “The Current”, just did a story on blogging and credibility where they simply took the background noise as fact and as a basis for a story, rather than being inquisitive and actually looking for the truth of the story. For details on the controversy in question, which revolves around the Howard Dean presidential campaign, you can look at myDD.com.

Here is the e-mail I sent to CBC after the story aired:

Subject: Your story on blogging and credibility
Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2005 09:53:13 -0400
From: Alexander O'Neill
To: thecurrent@cbc.ca

This morning when the host introduced the segment about blogging and credibility she used a throwaway line about two bloggers working for the Dean campaign having suspect credibility. This is a non-story, and has been blown out of proportion by knee-jerk outrage-prone US media.

Each of these sites have archives and you can actually go back to see what they were doing at the time of the primary campaign. Each site had a disclaimer that the writers were working as consultants for the Dean campaign, this was never a secret.

As for the work for Howard Dean, this was limited to technical matters, such as which blogging software to use, how to set up the Internet connections, etc.

Anna Maria just said "two bloggers were paid to say positive things about howard dean". This is absolutely false.

Given that the US was able to invade Iraq because of the laziness and corruption of the mainstream media (Judith Miller, et. al.), any worrying about blogs' credibility is ignoring the elephant in the room.

The follow-up post to this one, with their reply, is here.
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