PressEthic

Blogs, Blogs, Blogs. It seems to be all anyone talks about anymore. Blogs are the future of the world, blogs make the unpublished, published. Blogs can kill a politicians career. While Fernando Ferrer’s blog misstep may not entirely ruin his career, it still paints him as a pretty shady individual, and at the worst possible time too. With him and Mayor Bloomberg constantly debating about the city’s educational status, with Ferrer blaming the Mayor for the city’s low graduation rate, it just doesn’t look good when Ferrer keeps trying to engineer himself as this public-school wonder boy when in fact he went to a Catholic school.

The news was splashed all over the front pages of New York City papers on Wednesday morning, and honestly it doesn’t look good for Ferrer. The Times has a spokewoman for Ferrer saying that the Democratic candidate for mayor merely passed on notes to an aide, who wrote the blog in his name. Ok first he lied, now he just looks like a lazy politician. The spokewoman goes on to cover that little misstep with an everybody’s does it clause stating, “This happens in political campaigns all the time. In this case he called in some ideas and someone got a little loose with the editing.” Well the whole thing never would have happened if he had actually *gasp, written it HIMSELF.

The New York Sun in their coverage of the fiasco includes a comment by Howard Dean, who appeared with Ferrer yesterday at a campaign event at a local high school. Dean downplays the idea of blogs, stating,

“What is this obsession with blogs? Does anyone care about education in this city? Freddy cares about education….I really think the people of New York are going to be more interested in what a Mayor Ferrer is going to do for the school system than they are about whatever Mayor Bloomberg’s nonsense about blogs is.”

Dean has a point. When people should be listening to how the opposing candidates are going to solve the educational woes of this city, they are more fired up about the missuse of a blog. But the controversy does highlight the danger of unethical blog use. While Ferrer and Bloomberg certainly realize that a quick way to the hearts of the voters, especially those with school aged children, is through the use of their blogs, it can also be used as a tool to turn the voters against them, if their credibility is dashed to pieces by a crappy post. Writing blogs is really a lot like politics, try to tell the truth at all times, and don’t let them catch you in a lie. Unfortunately by campaigning on the internet via blogging, as Ferrer hopefullly has learned, mistakes and falsehoods are easier to see, making it alot easier to get caught.