Talk:Media Bloggers Association

message: --rcox1963 11:18, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inaccurate Information 

message: MBA is tagged as a professional association, yet there is no evidence that it is recognized as such. My feeling is that this categorization should be removed if the condition on the category is that it is recognized as a professional association and not just self-selected as such. chradcliffe (talk)  —Preceding comment was added at 14:00, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tagging as Professional Association 

message: WP:COI up-front: I am an MBA member. FYI, the entire impact of the MBA on my life has been material for a few blog posts (and $25 or so membership dues out of my bank balance).
I've pulled the current criticisms under the following WP:COI provision
"An important example is that unsupported defamatory material appearing in articles may be removed at once. Anyone may do this, and should do this, and this guideline applies widely to any unsourced or poorly sourced, potentially libelous postings. In this case it is unproblematic to defend the interest of the person or institution involved."
BoingBoing and MakingLight ARE NOT RELIABLE SOURCES HERE!
They are out of their areas of expertise and hence formally, not encyclopedic WP:RS ON THIS TOPIC. Informally, they're talking through their hats and echo-chambering very wrong material.
Let's hash out any criticism on the talk page to make sure it's neutral and encyclopedic before putting it in the article.
-- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 14:33, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: People involved in media blogging - Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, etc. Not just being a big-audience blogger. Teresa Nielsen Hayden went off half-cocked and is wrong. Cory Doctrow is echoing her without checking with anyone else, so amplifying her errors. She hasn't retracted anything on the post last I saw even though comments have corrected her. This is too important today to let A-lister stubborness and ego result in mud-throwing. Please revert back to the version without the attacks. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 15:34, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Has anyone here bothered to note that BoingBoing published a CORRECTION and provided information that refutes the primary assertion in the false and defamatory post at Making Light - that the MBA is a "sham" and that it is just one blogger (me).  Or is it just too much fun using Wikipedia as a platform to make false personal attacks.  Robert Cox (talk) 12:41, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

text: Which is why WP:RS exists. Anyone can have an "opinion". But not all such opinions belong in an encyclopedia article. I don't want to escalate this to a 3RR war. In consideration of the time-sensitivity, and "Do No Harm", please revert voluntarily. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 16:25, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: WP:RS refers to a statement of fact. This is not a statement of fact, but a statement of fact about an opinion. It is noteworthy that a prominent blog such as BoingBoing has criticized the organization, and regardless of any one person's consideration of the facts, Cory Doctorow has rendered a noteworthy opinion on the matter, as has MakingLight. The article makes no claim of the veracity of the opinions, only that they exist. I would point to your WP:COI and suggest that you hold off on editing this article any further, and see if anyone else agrees with you on this point. chradcliffe (talk) 16:35, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You can't whitewash an accusation by converting it into a fact about an opinion. That's an old trick. Call it WP:UNDUE then. Neither blogger's opinion is encyclopedic in this area.  Third time - these are effectively accusations, and policy is they should be removed until justified by discussion and consensus. I ask once more, please revert voluntarily. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 16:41, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I have requested a third opinion (WP:3) on this matter. chradcliffe (talk) 16:48, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

text: I read this wikipedia article just out of curiosity, when visiting one of the mentioned blogs that are cited on the "criticism" part. For the lack of better word, it sounds a little biased to say "Prominent bloggers..". To me it sounds like someone is trying to give more credibility to the cites by calling the quoted bloggers "prominent". Since this is about blogs, why not just say "Bloggers" or "Blogs"? Or is there someone here who has been authorized to classify blogs as prominent or not? Tommi (talk) 19:49, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

text: Point of information - The organization is NOT "claiming to represent bloggers" in such an expansive or general way such that any A-list blogger anywhere could be taken to have an encyclopedia-worthy comment. That claim is an exaggerated and tendentious reading that has been made in order to attack a straw-man, and repeatedly denied by the MBA (not the least because it's utterly absurd and everyone knows it). -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 19:11, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

text: Point on Disinformation - I am not going to edit this entry because it is not appropriate for me to do so as President of the MBA and Ruler of the Blogosphere but I believe I am permitted to express my view in the discussion page.  If that is not correct I am sure someone will let me know.  My memory may be a little hazy but I seem to recall this entry was first created in Wikipedia by a commenter at Fire Dog Lake who then linked the entry to FDL, inviting other FDL commenters to edit the site.  The animating event that caused this person to create this entry was a front page story in The New York Times about Jane Hamsher and bloggers associated with Fire Dog Lake covering the Scooter Libby Trial.  Posters and commenters at FDL were angry because the writer of the piece, Scott Shane, had made numerous errors in his article including stating that a conservative blogger at the trial was part of Fire Dog Lake and attributing to me statements that I never made to the effect that I had obtained media credentials for Fire Dog Lake bloggers or something to that effect.  The fact is that I never discussed the topic with Scott Shane at all, his source for the statements was the Assistant to the Chief Administrative Judge at the U.S. District Court.  I know this because I called Scott Shane to express my shock and outrage and seeing him associating me with statements I never made.  Shane acknowledged the piece was wrong - he called it an "editing error" - and offered to write a correction.  I told him the damage was already done and that a correction was not going to fix it because the FDL people were rightly upset and that what I wanted him to do was pick up the phone and tell Jane what he told me - that he screwed up.  He blithely refused to do that.  He proceeded to write a non-corrective correction which compounded his error and then another and finally a third.  I demanded to speak to his editor but he refused stating he considered the matter closed.  The anger over the NYT piece had a lot to do with anger over a previous piece two months earlier in the Washington Post.  That piece had actually been written in November and early December and held by the Washington Post under an "exclusive" arrangement with me.  WaPo finally published the piece the week before the Libby Trial voir dire began and a few days after FDL published the news that THEY had been granted credentials.  FDL people were angry about THAT story because it described the MBA has having negotiated with the court for bloggers to be credentialed to the trial.  In their mind, I was attempting to lay claim to their achievement when, in their mind, they had announced their getting credentials the week before.  Compounding matters, many news organizations repeated the information in the WaPo piece so each new story that appeared, repeating the WaPo story that the MBA had negotiated access for blogger, was salt in the wound.  After so much salt in so many wounds, imagine their anger that they get a front page, above the fold, story in the New York Times and there in the third or fourth paragraph is Bob Cox once again saying he obtained their credentials.  From their perspective it is easy to understand their outrage.  Just as in this AP case, their is a back story which most FDL people do not know.  Some, however, like Jane Hamsher do know because I told her myself.  When FDL bloggers and commenters began attacking me on her site, I called Jane to speak up and say what she knew, that what they were saying was not true.  Her response was that when she added contributors to her site she decided to let go of any responsibility for what appeared on her site.  In other words, she knew perfectly well that the stories were untrue but would not life a finger to correct the record.  At that point I realized that I was dealing with people who not only did not want to hear the truth but were actively spreading information they knew to be false.  This Wikipedia entry is an example as are various posts being coordinated from certain emails lists on which FDL bloggers and their acolytes dominate.  In other words, this entry is part of a propaganda campaign designed to get "revenge" against me for what happened at Libby.  To put this in a Wikipedia context, this entry is massively Non-NPOV.  In fact, it is beyond, that is an active element in a smear campaign.
Just as I provided some backstory to the AP v. Drudge Retort case as someone who is actively involved in the case, dealing with all of the principals and working to resolve the case, I will provide some back story to this entry as well and how Libby played a role.  This is not directed at the FDL folks because they are not interested in anything other than continuing a petulant and unfounded campaign against me and, by extension, the MBA and anyone associated with it.  It is directed to people who care about Wikipedia and are true Wikipedians who would be offended at the thought of some people using this site to advance a personal agenda based on unfounded animosity.  Here goes:
After attending BloggerCon II and III, I encouraged Dave Winer to hold a similar event in a completely different part of the country like the South or the Midwest to dry and draw in a completely different set of bloggers and bring folks from lots of POVs together using the BloggerCon format as a model.  Dave was not interested in working on such an event but told me to go for it.  I did and the result was BlogNashville in 2005 at which a few hundred bloggers got together over a three day period at Belmont University and Vanderbilt University.  At Vandy we used the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center which is how I got to the folks who run the FAC.  They began inviting me to a conference series called "Justice & Journalism" where the FAC and the The Judicial Conference of the United States which is the judges from the federal courts and reporters who cover their courts.  Each session had judges and reporters from different districts as well as a core group that goes to each one. I would talk about the web and blogging and things like that.  It was at one of these conferences that the Founder of the FAC, John Seigenthaler asked to me to review an Op-Ed he was writing for USA Today about being defamed in Wikipedia which led to a well-publicized blow out between Jimmy Wales and John Seigenthaler.  I agreed to go to these conference because it was a chance to educate federal judges on citizen media which is very important to the MBA since we help bloggers in cases that might ultimately end up in federal court (as is the case with the current AP-DMCA issue).  There is time to socialize, have meals, grab a drink after hours and, of course, talk during the conferences themselves.  When my turn came to talk I would invariably close up my remarks by asking two things - that if the judges ended up with a blogger in their courtroom that they would extend to them whatever privleges and protections they would accord a journalist it he blogger was operating in a journalistic capacity and that the judges ought to be willing to credential bloggers as media to cover high profile cases.  Initially, my pitch was targeted at the Moussoui trial in Virginia but I had no luck there.  Then in October 2006 there was a J&J conference at the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC.  Most of the top judges from that court were there - Hogan, Kessler, Sentelle, Lamberth and others - when I made my standard pitch.  Many of the "regular" participants were also there and they had heard it before.  This time, however, I got a positive response and was asked by the judges how having bloggers would work.  I gave them some ideas, they asked me whether I would be interested to do this for the Libby trial.  Of course, I said yes.  I was asked for a proposal and sent it a couple days after the conference.  It was then approved and the MBA was offered two passes to the trial.  This all took place around end of October.  Because MBA Members like Dan Gillmor and Jeff Jarvis are constantly drilling it into my head that we cannot allow the MBA to become a "new gatekeeper" I included in my pitch the idea that they needed to all approve some NON-MBA bloggers or my members would be upset. They agreed to that as well.  It is this point which only adds to the anger and confusion at FDL.  The facts are the MBA did negotiate access for bloggers including non-MBA members and so that extent the MBA is responsible for blogs like FDL getting credentials.  That is not the same - as I repeatedly sought to make clear - as FDL themselves getting their credentials because they were approved on their own merits.  And the facts are that the most knowledgeable person at Libby by far was Marcy Wheeler who blogged on FDL and did such an amazing job that if there were a Pulitizer for live blogging she would have won hands down.  This point is the source for the quotes in the NYT's piece which came FROM THE COURT that the MBA negotiated access for bloggers.  We did.  But once the court agreed to allow bloggers (my doing) then each non-MBA blog that got approved did that themselves (their doing).  It is also the source for another bit of confusion of who was "first".  There was a blogger who was credentialed before Libby by the same people at the same court, for Judge Kessler's tobacco trial I believe.  But when reporters asked the court about whether Libby was the first time they said yes because the blogger who was credentialed for the tobacco trial was not credentialed AS A BLOGGER.  He was a blogger but that is not why they credentialed him.  Similarly, there had been bloggers at the Scrushy Trial and the Enron trial but those people were not credentialed AS BLOGGERS either.  Therefore, the first people who were actually credentialed we the MBA bloggers and blogs like FDL, TPM, HuffPo.  If you want to be more specific the first day of the voir dire there were TWO bloggers actually present - me and Pachoutec (sic) from FDL - so we were the first two - and since I know it will come up, yes I was there much earlier and so was the first blogger to be credentialed as a blogger to a federal trial beating out Pachoutec by about an hour or so.  So now let me back up to the WaPo story.  Alan Sipress learned from the folks at Project for Excellence in Journalism about the Media Bloggers Association and was interested to do a story.  We did a couple of interviews.  Then I got the email from the court saying the proposal for bloggers at Libby had been approved.  So I called him back and told him I had a better story.  He liked it a lot and told me that if I were to give it to him exclusive he thought he could get it to A1.  The story was completed in early December and set to run December 19, 2006.  It did not.  It was pushed back, and back, and back until it was finally published in mid-January.  This is another sore subject because the story had been held so long that by the time it ran it was a bit out of date (FDL got a small mention).  The facts of the story reported in the WaPo story were true but they did not seem true because it seemed to them like even though we got approved AFTER FDL the story was saying we not only got approved before FDL but that the MBA was the group responsible for ALL bloggers being considered for credentials.  The problem is that this is, in fact, the case.  The original discussion about blogger credentials for high profile court cases began in 2005 and occurred repeatedly at the J&J conference because I kept brining it up.  Some folks at these events liked the idea and were looking for the right case.  The stars aligned in October 2006 at the DC Court and the past two years of effort paid off in being asked for a proposal for bloggers to be credentialed at Libby.  I know FDL people don't want to hear that but if we went to the Great Court of Wikipedia Arbitration I could produce many federal judges and journalists from major papers who can testify on my behalf.  But if it is really a sticking point we can go straight to Jimmy Wales who can call John Seigenthalter who can then confirm that my account is correct.  Unfortunately, the burning hatred of me and the MBA over this issue is so intense that even when I tried to talk reasonably to people like Marcy and Pachoutec they were rude and obnoxious.  I was not happy with Jane but actually she was always polite and friendly so I can't diss her for that.  Now, pardon this interruption, please get back to producing your vitriolic anti-Bob Cox web page on Wikipedia, those of you doing so are a real credit to the spirit of Wikipedia...not!Robert Cox (talk) 15:21, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticisms 

message: I'll say first, these sources do not pass WP:RS. However, we have to look at what we're representing. This section states the feelings of bloggers, about an organization claiming to represent bloggers, and the bloggers aren't happy about that. Therefore, if you're going to cite the opinion of a blogger, it's going to be in a blog. I'd consider this a valid grounds to bypass RS, because blogging is integral to the subject of the article. A word to Mr. Finkelstein- while WP:COI does indeed say what you quoted, it is still a COI to remove criticisms about an organization you're involved with. Always. If you believed that section to be problematic, you should have gone to Editor Assistance and asked for disinterested editors to have a look. I applaud your making this COI known up front, but removing criticisms when you're involved in the organization will always raise eyebrows. JeremyMcCracken (talk) (contribs) 18:50, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Point of information - The organization is NOT "claiming to represent bloggers" in such an expansive or general way such that any A-list blogger anywhere could be taken to have an encyclopedia-worthy comment. That claim is an exaggerated and tendentious reading that has been made in order to attack a straw-man, and repeatedly denied by the MBA (not the least because it's utterly absurd and everyone knows it). -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 19:11, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

text: Point on Disinformation - I am not going to edit this entry because it is not appropriate for me to do so as President of the MBA and Ruler of the Blogosphere but I believe I am permitted to express my view in the discussion page.  If that is not correct I am sure someone will let me know.  My memory may be a little hazy but I seem to recall this entry was first created in Wikipedia by a commenter at Fire Dog Lake who then linked the entry to FDL, inviting other FDL commenters to edit the site.  The animating event that caused this person to create this entry was a front page story in The New York Times about Jane Hamsher and bloggers associated with Fire Dog Lake covering the Scooter Libby Trial.  Posters and commenters at FDL were angry because the writer of the piece, Scott Shane, had made numerous errors in his article including stating that a conservative blogger at the trial was part of Fire Dog Lake and attributing to me statements that I never made to the effect that I had obtained media credentials for Fire Dog Lake bloggers or something to that effect.  The fact is that I never discussed the topic with Scott Shane at all, his source for the statements was the Assistant to the Chief Administrative Judge at the U.S. District Court.  I know this because I called Scott Shane to express my shock and outrage and seeing him associating me with statements I never made.  Shane acknowledged the piece was wrong - he called it an "editing error" - and offered to write a correction.  I told him the damage was already done and that a correction was not going to fix it because the FDL people were rightly upset and that what I wanted him to do was pick up the phone and tell Jane what he told me - that he screwed up.  He blithely refused to do that.  He proceeded to write a non-corrective correction which compounded his error and then another and finally a third.  I demanded to speak to his editor but he refused stating he considered the matter closed.  The anger over the NYT piece had a lot to do with anger over a previous piece two months earlier in the Washington Post.  That piece had actually been written in November and early December and held by the Washington Post under an "exclusive" arrangement with me.  WaPo finally published the piece the week before the Libby Trial voir dire began and a few days after FDL published the news that THEY had been granted credentials.  FDL people were angry about THAT story because it described the MBA has having negotiated with the court for bloggers to be credentialed to the trial.  In their mind, I was attempting to lay claim to their achievement when, in their mind, they had announced their getting credentials the week before.  Compounding matters, many news organizations repeated the information in the WaPo piece so each new story that appeared, repeating the WaPo story that the MBA had negotiated access for blogger, was salt in the wound.  After so much salt in so many wounds, imagine their anger that they get a front page, above the fold, story in the New York Times and there in the third or fourth paragraph is Bob Cox once again saying he obtained their credentials.  From their perspective it is easy to understand their outrage.  Just as in this AP case, their is a back story which most FDL people do not know.  Some, however, like Jane Hamsher do know because I told her myself.  When FDL bloggers and commenters began attacking me on her site, I called Jane to speak up and say what she knew, that what they were saying was not true.  Her response was that when she added contributors to her site she decided to let go of any responsibility for what appeared on her site.  In other words, she knew perfectly well that the stories were untrue but would not life a finger to correct the record.  At that point I realized that I was dealing with people who not only did not want to hear the truth but were actively spreading information they knew to be false.  This Wikipedia entry is an example as are various posts being coordinated from certain emails lists on which FDL bloggers and their acolytes dominate.  In other words, this entry is part of a propaganda campaign designed to get "revenge" against me for what happened at Libby.  To put this in a Wikipedia context, this entry is massively Non-NPOV.  In fact, it is beyond, that is an active element in a smear campaign.
Just as I provided some backstory to the AP v. Drudge Retort case as someone who is actively involved in the case, dealing with all of the principals and working to resolve the case, I will provide some back story to this entry as well and how Libby played a role.  This is not directed at the FDL folks because they are not interested in anything other than continuing a petulant and unfounded campaign against me and, by extension, the MBA and anyone associated with it.  It is directed to people who care about Wikipedia and are true Wikipedians who would be offended at the thought of some people using this site to advance a personal agenda based on unfounded animosity.  Here goes:
After attending BloggerCon II and III, I encouraged Dave Winer to hold a similar event in a completely different part of the country like the South or the Midwest to dry and draw in a completely different set of bloggers and bring folks from lots of POVs together using the BloggerCon format as a model.  Dave was not interested in working on such an event but told me to go for it.  I did and the result was BlogNashville in 2005 at which a few hundred bloggers got together over a three day period at Belmont University and Vanderbilt University.  At Vandy we used the Freedom Forum's First Amendment Center which is how I got to the folks who run the FAC.  They began inviting me to a conference series called "Justice & Journalism" where the FAC and the The Judicial Conference of the United States which is the judges from the federal courts and reporters who cover their courts.  Each session had judges and reporters from different districts as well as a core group that goes to each one. I would talk about the web and blogging and things like that.  It was at one of these conferences that the Founder of the FAC, John Seigenthaler asked to me to review an Op-Ed he was writing for USA Today about being defamed in Wikipedia which led to a well-publicized blow out between Jimmy Wales and John Seigenthaler.  I agreed to go to these conference because it was a chance to educate federal judges on citizen media which is very important to the MBA since we help bloggers in cases that might ultimately end up in federal court (as is the case with the current AP-DMCA issue).  There is time to socialize, have meals, grab a drink after hours and, of course, talk during the conferences themselves.  When my turn came to talk I would invariably close up my remarks by asking two things - that if the judges ended up with a blogger in their courtroom that they would extend to them whatever privleges and protections they would accord a journalist it he blogger was operating in a journalistic capacity and that the judges ought to be willing to credential bloggers as media to cover high profile cases.  Initially, my pitch was targeted at the Moussoui trial in Virginia but I had no luck there.  Then in October 2006 there was a J&J conference at the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC.  Most of the top judges from that court were there - Hogan, Kessler, Sentelle, Lamberth and others - when I made my standard pitch.  Many of the "regular" participants were also there and they had heard it before.  This time, however, I got a positive response and was asked by the judges how having bloggers would work.  I gave them some ideas, they asked me whether I would be interested to do this for the Libby trial.  Of course, I said yes.  I was asked for a proposal and sent it a couple days after the conference.  It was then approved and the MBA was offered two passes to the trial.  This all took place around end of October.  Because MBA Members like Dan Gillmor and Jeff Jarvis are constantly drilling it into my head that we cannot allow the MBA to become a "new gatekeeper" I included in my pitch the idea that they needed to all approve some NON-MBA bloggers or my members would be upset. They agreed to that as well.  It is this point which only adds to the anger and confusion at FDL.  The facts are the MBA did negotiate access for bloggers including non-MBA members and so that extent the MBA is responsible for blogs like FDL getting credentials.  That is not the same - as I repeatedly sought to make clear - as FDL themselves getting their credentials because they were approved on their own merits.  And the facts are that the most knowledgeable person at Libby by far was Marcy Wheeler who blogged on FDL and did such an amazing job that if there were a Pulitizer for live blogging she would have won hands down.  This point is the source for the quotes in the NYT's piece which came FROM THE COURT that the MBA negotiated access for bloggers.  We did.  But once the court agreed to allow bloggers (my doing) then each non-MBA blog that got approved did that themselves (their doing).  It is also the source for another bit of confusion of who was "first".  There was a blogger who was credentialed before Libby by the same people at the same court, for Judge Kessler's tobacco trial I believe.  But when reporters asked the court about whether Libby was the first time they said yes because the blogger who was credentialed for the tobacco trial was not credentialed AS A BLOGGER.  He was a blogger but that is not why they credentialed him.  Similarly, there had been bloggers at the Scrushy Trial and the Enron trial but those people were not credentialed AS BLOGGERS either.  Therefore, the first people who were actually credentialed we the MBA bloggers and blogs like FDL, TPM, HuffPo.  If you want to be more specific the first day of the voir dire there were TWO bloggers actually present - me and Pachoutec (sic) from FDL - so we were the first two - and since I know it will come up, yes I was there much earlier and so was the first blogger to be credentialed as a blogger to a federal trial beating out Pachoutec by about an hour or so.  So now let me back up to the WaPo story.  Alan Sipress learned from the folks at Project for Excellence in Journalism about the Media Bloggers Association and was interested to do a story.  We did a couple of interviews.  Then I got the email from the court saying the proposal for bloggers at Libby had been approved.  So I called him back and told him I had a better story.  He liked it a lot and told me that if I were to give it to him exclusive he thought he could get it to A1.  The story was completed in early December and set to run December 19, 2006.  It did not.  It was pushed back, and back, and back until it was finally published in mid-January.  This is another sore subject because the story had been held so long that by the time it ran it was a bit out of date (FDL got a small mention).  The facts of the story reported in the WaPo story were true but they did not seem true because it seemed to them like even though we got approved AFTER FDL the story was saying we not only got approved before FDL but that the MBA was the group responsible for ALL bloggers being considered for credentials.  The problem is that this is, in fact, the case.  The original discussion about blogger credentials for high profile court cases began in 2005 and occurred repeatedly at the J&J conference because I kept brining it up.  Some folks at these events liked the idea and were looking for the right case.  The stars aligned in October 2006 at the DC Court and the past two years of effort paid off in being asked for a proposal for bloggers to be credentialed at Libby.  I know FDL people don't want to hear that but if we went to the Great Court of Wikipedia Arbitration I could produce many federal judges and journalists from major papers who can testify on my behalf.  But if it is really a sticking point we can go straight to Jimmy Wales who can call John Seigenthalter who can then confirm that my account is correct.  Unfortunately, the burning hatred of me and the MBA over this issue is so intense that even when I tried to talk reasonably to people like Marcy and Pachoutec they were rude and obnoxious.  I was not happy with Jane but actually she was always polite and friendly so I can't diss her for that.  Now, pardon this interruption, please get back to producing your vitriolic anti-Bob Cox web page on Wikipedia, those of you doing so are a real credit to the spirit of Wikipedia...not!Robert Cox (talk) 15:21, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: [[WP:3O|Third opinion]]

message: It is worth looking at this investigative study into Mr. Cox' work alongside his MBA board members.
See press release below & link to the study:
Nov. 16, 2007: TrueDialog.org releases "All the Senator's Men," an Investigative Study
TrueDialog.org today released an investigative study that looks at the boundaries separating and connecting political blogging, journalism and public relations. Carl Lindemann, TrueDialog.org's founder, (see bio and disclosure) wrote and researched the study entitled All the Senator's Men? The Ethics in Advancing a Campaign's Story.
The study examines how senior members of the Media Bloggers Association (MBA) participated in bringing forward a story that originated from Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) reelection campaign. The story briefly gained national prominence in the conservative media last month. 
Robert Cox, MBA's president and founder, authored a "report" that claimed that Google, the prominent online company, had "banned advertisements critical of MoveOn.org," placed by the Collins campaign. Cox's piece failed to disclose key relationships, including the author's ties to the source of the story in the Collins campaign, an MBA board member.  
A favorable interpretation of these activities might see this as an example of gaining exposure for an important story overlooked by the “mainstream media.” Alternately, critics may conclude that this event shows bloggers engineering a springboard for a smear campaign.
The investigative study looks at the ethical issues involved, and is intended to stimulate debate and discussion about media ethics. It is designed for easy adoption in seminar and classroom settings.
The investigative study is available here:
http://www.truedialog.org/MBA_study/MBA_index.html  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.14.52.120 (talk) 04:51, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: NOTE: This "investigative study" is nothing more than local political mudslinging having very little to do with the MBA and a lot to do with anger among some in Maine against a blogger who the MBA helped in 2006.  These people crawl out from under their rock every time the MBA is in the news.  The lawsuit against the blogger was withdrawn after the MBA organized a blog-based media response to a baseless defamation and copyright lawsuit filed in federal court by an advertising agency working for the Maine Office of Tourism.  An examination of internal MOT documents, obtained under FOIA, later showed that the lawsuit had been coordinated with the Director of the MOT who was fired by the Governor of Maine shortly after this news became public.  The blogger in question later began working for the Sen. Susan Collins Re-election Campaign.  MoveOn.org and Daily Kos have targeted the Maine Senate Race.  This "study" was written by a guy with  some axe to grind that has everything to do with corrupt political cronyism as practiced in Maine and little to do with me or the MBA.  Whether this person is associated with the former MOT director or his completely unhinged wife, progressive political activists or the Maine Democratic Party is hard for me to say.  What I do know is that ever since the MBA got the case in Maine withdrawn, the same band of people from that state, attempt to attack me and the MBA, every time the MBA gets attention in the traditional media and on the blogs. Robert Cox (talk) 12:41, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  More on Rober Cox and "Journalistic" activities with his MBA board members 

message: At the end of the day, after this issue died away the entry was still quite biased.  I have made an effort to balance it.  Unfortunately I have not kept up on my WP coding skills and made a mess of the footnotes, but it seemed more important to have the links there than not.  I maintain that in light of all the above, the article currently reflects a more neutral POV.  Then again, I am not neutral, either.
--Ron Coleman (talk) 20:57, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Balanced edit 

message: I can't find any recent mention of this group's activities, its website is unavailable, and its Facebook page appears to have been abandoned.  It's annoying not to be able to source the organization's dissolution, but it certainly doesn't appear to be an active professional association now or recently... Robertissimo (talk) 05:45, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: As a member when it was active, at least way back in the original form, I can confirm there has been no activity in a very long time - or at least I haven't heard anything at all (if there is a mailing list, I assume I'm still on it). Though it's unlikely there will be an announcement, as I suppose it's formally more of an indefinite hiatus. -- Seth Finkelstein (talk) 09:48, 26 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Is it defunct?

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified