- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
One of the things people who keep real logs learn quickly is that revisions are OK if you show the edit trail, but erasures are intentioal lies. That's not the common perception of blog owners, in my experience, which is why I read few blogs anymore, and believe almost nothing I read on any of them. The temptation for a blog owner without journalistic training to put a greasy thumb on the scales they operate, after the fact, is just too strong, too often. And frankly, it's too easy with most blogging packages to be a revisionist, rather than to be responsible for the words you write, and the damage they may then do. Re-writing a blog post is basic dishonesty. If your opinions have changed on a subject, because you've learned new things about it, or have reflected on your previous views, post a corrective entry, and let your previous entry stand, in the post succession you made, and with the comment history it engendered (if you allow comments). That is the way a real pen-and-ink bound book log works, and it's the time tested standard for records in navigation, broadcasting, aviation, and hundreds of other human endeavors where truth matters. It's the honest way to log on the Web.
Amanda Marcotte, by her own admissions, isn't a competent Webmaster (if she's in control of at least two blogs that have had problems with archive corruption, she clearly knows nothing about backup and restore of databases, or can't functionally do it, which is the same thing). She also went into the job with some faulty premises (that she could or should keep publishing a personal blog, while working as professional blogger, an obvious conflict of interest situation), and learned little from the experience, as she is still blaming her problems on others, not on her own failures of foresight, ethics, or operation. She could not even see how carrying a personal history of partisanship into a campaign staff position of this nature, could cause problems for the campaign, rather than be an asset to it, which calls into question how astute her political instincts may be.
That said, her problems may lead the Edwards campaign, and others, to vet potential "blogmasters" a lot more closely, for their professional standards and real world capabilities. It was just silly for the Edwards campaign to hire someone to run a public media organ, who wasn't technically or ethically competent to do so, and any blowback they've experienced in having said person jump ship two weeks later should be sufficient reason to re-think the utility of a blog to a political campaign, beyond being a simple record of the campaign and the candiates activities, entirely.
