Noted Washington Post Media watchdog today provides a fairly straightforward review of John Edwards campaign's "use" of bloggers/vloggers...
What's striking about the "Webisode," in which Edwards chats on his plane with a freelance video crew, is that it looks like a television documentary, with quick-cut editing and a jerky handheld camera. Edwards, in a work shirt and jeans, is seen chatting with others, not looking at the camera. He says he wants to be judged "based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll. . . . You're trained to be careful. You're trained to close off, if it feels sensitive, if it feels personal. . . . We're conditioned to saying the same thing, we're conditioned to saying what's safe, we're conditioned to be political, and it's hard to shed all that."
The campaign hired Andrew Baron, founder of the satirical news site Rocketboom.com, to provide advice and to shoot Edwards's announcement video, which was posted on YouTube the night before the candidate personally declared his candidacy in New Orleans. Rocketboom also conducted a separate interview for its Web site, consisting of such softball questions as "What is the John Edwards candidacy about?"
Baron says Rocketboom "is not a journalistic platform" and sets its own ethical standards. As for Edwards, Baron says by e-mail, "this is his opportunity, along with all of ours, to use the video medium to show who he really is/we really are."
We posed many of the same questions in our "Vloggers & Candidates: New Rules?" post two weeks ago. If the (private) reaction to that post from journalists who read this blog provides any legitimate barometer reading, than today's Kurtz column won't be the last time where these issues are raised and debated as the 2008 campaign kicks into gear.
Update: Rocketboom's Chuck Olsen responds to the Kurtz piece with some introspection. Gannett's political editor hits vloggers on the transparency issue.
(screen shot courtesy of Chuck Olsen's Flickr account)
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