If McCain wins it reflects the electorate's Internet-phobic stance. We sell McCain and Obama campaign watches and we track the results on www.lectionwatches.com. Obama is outpacing McCain on the websales with 77% of sales. That's much greater than the difference in the polls, which could lead you to believe that one reason for the discrepancy is that McCain supporters are less likely to surf around and shop the Internet.

Farhad,

Since I was the poster child for your article I want to make sure your readers know that you left out some really important points that we talked about during our interview together.

1. I told you that I had made a bad business decision but not a dishonest one. I fully disclosed that I was receiving compensation from those featured in the VNRs. As I said to you in our interview, it is not a crime to switch from being a journalist to a marketer so long as you are clear with people on what it is you do.

2.The piece on the iPod was actually a damn good piece. Every parent was rushing out to buy their kids an iPod that holiday and not taking a few minutes to find out what they'd do with them. If the kid wasn't grabbing as much illegal music as possible then they were rummaging iTunes for explicit lyrics.

Parents had no clue about the tool they were giving their kids. This, by the way, became a well documented story that was widely reported in the news. And because of segments like mine parents knew that there were parental controls they should be using. (I've also encouraged parents to give kids a digital allowance to buy legal music and support artists)

TV can sensationalize things a bit, but the piece you refer to was an important service. Obviously printed books and blog columns can be sensationalized as well.

As i said to you in our interview, advertorial, infomercials and other sponsored information can be extremely helpful and well produced. But they need to be labeled clearly.

I know that you're a nice guy and an earnest one but I can't help but think that you conveniently went for the bone and missed the nuance of a much meatier conversation.

Regards,

Robin