This past weekend, everyone had a cow because a bunch of bloggers were paid to endorse a product and did not properly disclose it, basically. 

Many felt that this violated a major tenet of publishing with regards to not crossing the wall between advertising and editorial.  Some of the accused agreed, some did not, a few were just baffled.

Today Fred Vogelstein published something on the central character of Readygate, Michael Arrington.  To frame his story, he used an anecdote that in itself is inconsequential, but proved to be untrue. 

Clearly, someone lied.  Yes, the matter at hand was irrelevant, but when I tell people “don’t lie, it blows your entire credibility,” this is why.  What else is a lie?

While the anecdote was immaterial, it made me wonder, if that is incorrect and inaccurate, what else in traditional publishing is inaccurate, too?  Do writers and their subjects make things up because they’re not being taped and can get away with it, or was this an exception, and not the rule…

A lot of very experienced and intelligent people chimed in on Federated Media’s Microsoft’s campaign, but why aren’t these same people asking the question I’m asking today?

Is it ok to blast Michael Arrington, one of the new poster boys for new media publishing but not ok to question what made Fred Vogelstein push the boundaries of accuracy?  Or who knows, maybe Arrington the subject of the story twist the facts to embelish an otherwise immaterial detail and Fred had no clue…

I don’t know what to say about this but I think the same people who made a fat stink about the MSFT campaign, even a few days after the fact should be going at this with the same ferociousness they did this past weekend, otherwise there’s a major problem if we care more about what goes around the message than what actual the message is.

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