Earl Mardle gives another example of a business suffering from scrutiny of detail. A listener to KSFO in San Francisco compiled highlights of its right wing shock jocks on his her blog (called Spocko) and then wrote to advertisers drawing attention to the kind of ideas they were effectively supporting. The result: advertisers flee from KSFO in droves.
Disney, the ultimate owners of the station try shooting the messenger: they use legal threats to shut down the blog. Result: that action itself becomes a social object, and a second – perhaps larger – wave of adverse publicity hits the company. Earl says
The real issue here is what Spocko actually did. She did not lie, he did not defame, she just recorded something that is given away free and made sure that the people who pay knew what they buying and asked them to stop.
Like George Felix Allen of Macaca fame during the last US General election, these guys are being slain by their own words. While the so-called professional media get all uppity about the standards that bloggers may or may not stick to, it is time and time again, the corporate media that is being found wanting, both in its ethics and its profesisonalism, by the bloggers.
