Politics Online and Manna from Heaven

It's an amazing thing, actually. Needing examples of ETHICAL issues for my internet marketing course this past Tuesday, I racked my brain trying to come up with something that would be interesting, engagine and thought provoking -- and have SOMETHING to do with the Internet! Tuesday morning as I drove to work, I was getting worried. I still had nothing and class was at 9:30 a.m.!

I shouldn't have worried. Like Manna from Heaven the news broke on VPR as I drove in...

Many thanks to Martha Rainville and most especially her enterprising staff member who decided to enhance her campaign website with "borrowed" text from other locations. Locations such as HILLARY CLINTON's website! Get the scoop here at Peter Freyne's Inside Track blog. Even more interesting is on Tuesday morning when we looked at Martha's website -- well, let's just say that they made a bad situation even worse! They had pulled the site down because, well most of it was plagairized, which may have seemed like the right thing to do at the time...however at the same time they did that most of the local press had picked up the story and run it. Of course that means people were hitting the site and getting two failed image loads and a hastily typed message that the site would be back up soon. Missed opportunity to post a response or their news release on this issue and to take back some control. By the way...it's still down but at least there's an image there now! But still NO PR response at all. Tsk Tsk Tsk

So what are the implications for Republican Candidate Rainville just FIVE SHORT weeks away from the election? Students in my class really hit the nail on the head -- not only does it make someone wonder about the candidate's integrity (if she hasn't written her own policies and provided the content to the web folks, what is up with that?), but if they aren't able to handle the PR required for a situation like this and put up a response (frankly it would take but a few minutes longer to post!), how will they respond to other issues as well?

Of course there is the further interesting implication that the person who "broke" the story was a BLOGGER doing comparisons. See the Burlington Free Press article.

Naturally as we spoke of ethics and online issues students brought up Rep. Foley -- is that TOM or MARK, by the way? Yep, dems wrote a response and got the two mixed up. Tom Foley former speaker of the house and Democrat who retired in 1995 (ok, was not re-elected) vs. Mark Foley. Sigh. Same last name, but HARDLY interchangeable. So what does this have to do with ethics on the web? Um...get your facts straight people before you publish stuff!