As a fellow attendee of the Edwards dinner, I'd argue that revoking the posting privileges of folks who criticize him on your site is probably not the best way to look as if you exited the meal with integrity intact. Even if Stirling had other reasons for banning BOP News poster RJ Eskow and deleting all his old pieces doing it directly after RJ posted something critical of John Edwards is about as bad as optics get.
When Stirling tipped Garance off about the dinner, she wrote:
Gaining the loyalty of bloggers...is not that hard to do if you just talk to them
In my eyes, that made us all look bad, in addition to being a load of crap. But who knows, maybe Garance put her finger directly on the problem. As bloggers begin to get courted by more pols and bigger names, we're going to have to figure out some way to deal with the attention without looking -- without being! -- hopelessly compromised. Maybe that means full disclosure of every meal and conversation, though, like in journalism, I fear that won't work. After all, how many bloggers, if asked to an off-the-record dinner (which the Edwards dinner wasn't, by the way) with Hillary Clinton or Brian Schweitzer would cheerfully decline, citing online ethics? We want the access too much to deny it. Indeed, it's happpening now. The Edwards dinner was by no means first, there have been a slew of meet and greets, meals, drinks, conventions and conference calls that various groups of bloggers have attended, and it'll only get worse from here. How to deal with it, I don't know. But Stirling's actions, innocent or not, reflect badly on all of our credibility.
