I’ve decided to cut off any new information against candidates — there’s no longer time for candidates to respond. If I were to discover today that Bob McDonnell had personally laundered money for Jack Abramoff (something that I just now completely invented), I wouldn’t blog about it, because it wouldn’t be fair to the McDonnell campaign.
The race is between the candidate’s ground games now. I’m not going to muddy the waters by becoming an enabler for dirty tricks.
It’s worth noting that nobody has asked or suggested that I spread any new information, nor do I have any reason to suspect that will happen. But if blogs are to avoid being regulated by the GA come January, I think it’s necessary for us to make public these kinds of best-practices.
Waldo,
I applaud your restraint, but why do you have to be on “good behavior” in order to not invite the ire of the General Assembly?
Shouldn’t the 1st Amendment be protection enough for everyone online? If we see regulation of the internet by Congress or the states, I hope that we will see widespread civil disobedience in response to it. And I think that regulation is inevitable, the politicians (on both sides) have too much to lose no matter what they might say publicly.
My fear with all the self imposed constraints you and other bloggers are putting on themselves is that you are implicitly stating that you think you should be regulated, and you’re just trying to state up front “but we’ll regulate ourselves, so please leave us alone.” I agree with your end goal of being left alone but the method should simply be through recognition of your free speech rights, not by replacing government regulation with regulation a subset of bloggers writes. No other reason needs to be given.
And what do you think of the failed attempt in Congress to prevent FEC regulation of bloggers?
The First Amendment is the First Amendment, but you know as well as I do that Virginia is only safe when the GA isn’t in session. There’s nothing keeping them from passing laws that regulate Virginia political blogs. If they did that, then we’d have to have a drawn-out court battle, in which we may or may not prevail.
(We are, by the way, already regulated under SBE laws, as discussed extensively at August’s Summit on Blogging and Democracy in the Commonwealth.)
Self-regulation is not an invitation to external regulation. Quite the opposite — it’s done to prevent external regulation. Look no further than the RIAA, the MPAA, or the ESRB for evidence of that. I believe you’ll enjoy the Cato Institute’s take on the matter of self-regulation.