Comments on: What #Trafigura can teach political parties and others

By: Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #143

Top of the Blogs: The Golden Dozen #143 — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:58:25 +0000

[...] What #Trafigura can teach political parties and others on Rob Fenwick’s a Northuimbrian abroad blog. “When Rob speaks the rest of us are well [...]

By: Tim Ireland

Tim Ireland — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:58:44 +0000

The Anne Milton weblog would not have emerged had she simply engaged… but instead of treating my question about a push-polling phone call with honesty and respect, she sought to lie to me and fob me off. Ditto with subsequent questions about her use of activists and campaign workers posing as ordinary members of the public in her pamphlets. She then went on to ‘ignore’ me further while making snide comments to the press designed to smear me as being somehow unbalanced. Later, two activist who worked on her campaign attacked me via a series of anonymous comments (do stop me if any of this is sounding familiar). They then went on to anonymously publish a xenophobic attack on me and a deeply homophobic attack on a Lib Dem activist they thought was ‘in on it’ (they accused him of paedophilia, at one stage purely on the basis that he admitted he was homosexual). Milton emerged from the resulting scuffle with her job intact, but there’s no denying the hole she dug for herself.

(The two activists were both endorsed by the Conservatives as candidates for local council, and both lost miserably.)

By: Diversity

Diversity — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:05:43 +0000

A damaging story in the internet ( almost anywhere in the internet) is like a an old-fashioned hue-and-cry that you cannot outrun or block. The only tactics are to face it immediately and/or divert it quickly.

By: Iain

Iain — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:43:20 +0000

Guide – but the Telegraph gets a lot more readers every day than you get in a whole month.

By: Morus

Morus — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:12:58 +0000

Good article Rob, and I agree to a point, but I think you’re wrong to recommend that PR people treat bloggers as they would any other hostile journalist.

PR people should be far more scared of an activist blogger than a hostile journalist. The majority of us aren’t doing it for money, we’re doing it for conviction and/or thrill of the hunt. We’ll not sleep for two nights to advertise the story, or get a network of people working on the story that a newsroom would never finance. There are no lawyers to tell us that the story isn’t worth the risk of publication, and no managers who can fire us for taking a harsher line or edging the ethical borders to get information.

As you point out, there is no mechanism of control, no means to influence, and little chance of changing the narrative if it takes off. If you treat hostile journalists with respect, you should treat an activist blogger like Guido or Tim Ireland as though you’re dealing with nitroglycerine.

By: Jennie

Jennie — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:49:34 +0000

If Guido is the Torygraph, does that make Mrs Dale the Daily Fail?

By: Guido Fawkes

Guido Fawkes — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:59:57 +0000

Humph. I doubt that any of the Telegraph blogs have the kind of traffic Guido does.