Friday, February 9, 2007

The long cybertrail

On Tuesday I wrote here about John Edwards' hiring of a "blogmaster" for his 2008 presidential campaign. The blogmaster was Amanda Marcotte, of pandagon.net. I saw it as another step in the trend of co-opting bloggers to serve not only as public relations hired hands but also as a kind of alternative to media coverage. When you're out on the trail, you will always have major media with you if you're a major candidate like Edwards. But you can't control what they say. Enter the blogger, who writes diaries that look like journalism but don't have the same odor.

It turns out that on the very day I wrote about Marcotte, she and another Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, came under fire from the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which demanded they be fired for messages they wrote before working on the campaign. (The New York Times today described the old posts as "long cybertrails of incendiary comments on sex, religion and politics.")

Edwards reviewed the old blog posts, some of which were disparaging about powerful Catholics, and took his time responding. Then he decided to keep them on staff. Another instance, perhaps, of the blog genre bumping against the professional and political world's expectations. (That's how Wonkette makes her daily bread.)

Posted by Evan Hughes at 09:36 AM

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