Reading from the press releases – I would ask, how is that any different from an endorsement of whomever wrote the thing? How can bloggers be accused and smeared for no original reporting without hypocrisy?

Sigh.

Thanks for commenting.

And then there was the big fluff up last year about how news stations were using what amounted to infomercials that just looked a bit more like hard news stories during their broadcasts – remember that?

Here’s an article about how the entities we call traditional journalism outlets, (which should be, we or at least Susan Goldberg is saying, held to this certain standard) blur the lines between news, ads and infomercials.

So – again – what’s being asserted as something so threatened by four bloggers who got less than 1000 a day on average and were expected to be political seems to really be at risk due to the money-making decisions of its members of the old guard.

Blame Murphy Brown? As if she were real? That’s the problem. As a fictional character, Murphy Brown could talk about as many real people as she (or the show’s writers) pleased. It’s OK for her to step over the fictional line and blur fiction with fact.

The vice president who thought a fictional character’s situation applied to real life? Not a journalist.

The FEMA folks? Not journalists either. They’re in public relations. To journalism’s credit, it was a journalist on the “listen-only” telephone line that smelled a rat. To its discredit, some media outlets ran the “news” before the real story came out.