All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Today’s “Outside Voices” by Edelman PR man and blogger Steve Rubel wasn’t solicited for convenient timing but in many ways it couldn’t have worked out any better. The nexus of public relations and the blogosphere popped up as much-discussed issue this week, thanks primarily to a New York Times article. It’s a discussion worth paying attention to.

The Times’ article by Michael Barbaro examined the extent to which PR companies are reaching out to bloggers to spread their client’s messages. The story singled out Edelman’s (pure coincidence I swear) work on behalf of Wal-Mart, including an aggressive blog-outreach effort. Here’s the nut of the story:

Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters.

But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, has been forthright with bloggers about the origins of its communications, and the company and its public relations firm, Edelman, say they do not compensate the bloggers.

Leaving the ideological battle over Wal-Mart aside, the real question raised by Barbaros’ story is whether or not bloggers can, in the end, be trusted? This, of course, was certain to offend a great many in the blogosphere. Basically, the theme of the story is this: Wal-Mart and its PR firm, Edelman, communicate with bloggers, send them news, topics, selective factoids and talking points. They even go so far as to suggest bloggers re-write what they’ve received so as not to parrot the actual words of the company if they’re used. The veiled implication is that bloggers who write positively about Wal-Mart should be viewed with suspicion because it just may be the voice of the company speaking instead of the writer. By extension, what’s to prevent the corruption of the entire blogosphere by similar tactics?

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If, like me, you spend a good deal of your time reading blogs, you are all too familiar with one phrase (and its abbreviation) and the vitriol that so often accompanies its mention: mainstream media. MSM.



My personal favorite analysis on the subject comes from William Wolfe, who attempted to parse the hatred at McSweeney’s:

Reasons Bloggers Hate the Mainstream Media.


The MSM is too liberal.

Professor always calls on the MSM.

Bloggers got stood up at prom. By the MSM.

But it was Franklin Foer who, in a recent piece in The New Republic, (predictably) struck a chord when he took a swing at the MSB (mainstream blogosphere) for taking swings at the MSM (got all that straight?):

"The mainstream blogosphere (MSB) is only too happy to bury the old media regime, because it has an implicit vision for a new order, one that would largely consist of ... bloggers. In other words, they envision a universe that resembles the nineteenth-century partisan newspapers or the Fleet Street model, where writers and thinkers break from the illusion of "objectivity" and print the "truth." (I acknowledge that the liberal blogosphere is hardly a monolith and that blogs don't always lend themselves to coherent thought, but common themes and arguments are clear enough.)"

Following the “flurry of responses, not all of them friendly,” to the piece, Foer addressed what he felt was readers' literal-minded interpretation of his point:

“People have taken my coinage 'Mainstream Blogosphere' seriously. But I'll be the first to concede that it's a dumb, adolescent term. I simply wanted to highlight the stupidity of the ubiquitous 'Mainstream Media.' There are, of course, lots of liberal bloggers that I respect (e.g. Marshall, Yglesias, Drum) for their reporting, analytical capabilities, and writing. And they shouldn't be lumped with the likes of the ranters and cheap shot artists who I have critiqued. Similarly, CNN, NPR, and The Washington Post are very different beasts, who don't deserve to be polemically lumped together so often. That's just sloppy.

And that set off a semantic argument from Atrios at his blog.

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In the New Republic, Franklin Foer has a warning for left-wing bloggers who seek to take down the MSM. Foer says they’re playing right into the hands of the right-wing bloggers (tip of the hat to Romenesko). Read the entire piece, it should stoke the debate:

“There's another reason that liberals shouldn't be so quick to help conservatives crush old media. Because of the right's alliance with business, it simply has more resources to shovel at its institutions--and it has been doing exactly that for the last 40 years. And, unlike liberals, conservatives have already proved themselves masters of partisan media, where they reduce their political program into highly saleable, entertaining populism. If the battle of ideas doesn't have credible, neutral arbiters like the so-called MSM--and liberals jump into an ideological shoving match with bigger, badder, conservative outlets--there's no question which side will prevail.”

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I was not enthusiastic when Dick Meyer approached me about the suggestion from Hugh Hewitt that they make public their recent correspondence. Initially I was hesitant to put the back-and-forth on PE for a couple reasons.



First off, I felt like I had reasonably explained my position on the inane reaction to Brian Montopoli’s story about journalist bloggers. Sometimes a list is just a list, but I don’t think even Freud could psychoanalyze those who saw sinister motives at work in ours. Secondly, it struck me as being a smidge over-indulgent. Of course, so does this entry thus far but believe me, there’s a larger point in here somewhere.



In the end, it was the idea of “transparency” that persuaded me that we should air the exchange for the whole World Wide Web to see. That and the rather revealing agenda at play on the part of Hewitt (I’ll leave it to others to find Meyer’s agenda). It’s one I saw demonstrated elsewhere this week.

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