On the pro-suspension side, a reader at the University of Michigan writes:As a regular reader of your blog (i.e. at break time, I go straight to it to read the latest), I think that you should either put it on hiatus, change the focus, or have a big, permanent, honking disclaimer, as another correspondent said. I don’t think it’s just a matter of hyperlegalism (although that is a problem these days). If I followed the Handyman’s Helper blog and later learned that Handy Hal was a consultant for Home Depot and hadn’t clearly revealed it, I’d be a bit ticked off, even if I hadn’t set foot in Home Depot.If you continue to blog and do any less than announce your consultant status in every column, many liberals will use that to try to discredit you and National Review, as they (wrongly) tried with Maggie Gallagher after Armstrong Williams was (rightly) dropped by Tribune Media Services. Whether you get paid by the Giuliani campaign or not is irrelevant. Serving as an advocate gives you just as much of an interest in a campaign as if you got paid. And even with disclaimers, they will likely accuse NRO of being a web informercial for Republicans. No matter what political issue you write about, there will be a suspicion, however unfair, that your writing is colored by your work for Giuliani.David’s Bookshelf is a good potential blog topic during the campaign. (Full disclosure: I’m a librarian.)
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