Filed under: indescribable
There’s been a big hullabaloo about credibility and blogging this past week, sparked by a recent Armstrong Williams/Ketchum/Department of Education scandal. Right on its heels came a detailed post about blogger ethics by Zephyr Teachout, and publicity of this week’s WebCred conference here at Berkman. Subsequent articles (in the WSJ,
et al.) have tried to compare Williams’s lack of disclosure with Kos‘s
partial disclosure, generally to the Blogger’s discredit.
Contributors to the melee include pro- and
anti-disestablismentarian bloggers and journalists (look how un/conflicted the interests of bloggers are! Clearly they can/cannot be trusted!), politicians buttressing and bashing Howard Dean(for-DNC-chair) (look how clean/corrupt his campaign was!), political bloggers for and against Kos (look what a blog-god/whore he is!), campaign groupies for and against (look how open and moral / calculating and vituperative she is!), and even more restrictive subsubgroups, such as bloggers for and against the Berkman Center (look at what actively idealistic people / kitten-eating cyborgs they are!).
Someone I know has a great picture of the lot of them eating kittens, but is holding back in the hopes of blackmailing a free parking spot out of John Palfrey. And for the record, I think every last one of the individuals and institutions mentioned in the previous paragraph is simultaneously decent and human. Yes, even the DoE.