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DEL.ICIO.USBloggers’ deep fear: Political campaigns will infiltrate their sites
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bloggers thrive on their sense of authenticity. Unlike the MSM, so the theory goes, they present the truth unvarnished and untouched by corporate hands.
That is, unless some savvy campaign publicist figures out that blogs, like every other medium, can be manipulated for his — or his candidate’s — ends.
In a Boston Globe article published last week, our own Erick Erickson of Macon — star of peachpundit.com and redstate.com — served as the lead example on the topic:
Erick Erickson has been running the popular blog Redstate.com long enough to know what his readers’ postings sound like: red-meat conservative rhetoric served up with a little dash of populist anger.
So when postings from an unknown writer on the site showed up praising Senator John McCain — one of the site’s least-popular Republicans for his deviations from hard-core conservative orthodoxy — Erickson thought he smelled a rat.
Or maybe a sock puppet, shill, or a troll — Web slang for bloggers who pretend to be grass-roots political commentators but instead are paid public relations agents.
The author of the pro-McCain articles on Redstate.com, Erickson determined after a Google search, was a Michigan political operative whose firm worked for McCain’s political action committee.
With big corporations now hiring public relations firms to pay fake bloggers to plant favorable opinions of the businesses online, many political bloggers are concerned that candidates, too, will hire people to pretend to be grass-roots citizens expressing views.
“This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant,” Erickson said in an interview. “I expect there will be commenters jumping in and trying to build negative campaigns to cause scandal for the other side. That’s my fear.”
Read the rest of the article here
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