Right to Privacy

Image courtesy of Jossip

I was invited to attend the Reuters' Newmaker Event : Public figures, Private Lives.

The focus was actually on celebrities, paparazzi and the rise new media upstarts like Perez Hilton, Jossrip or the indy image agency Splash News. You all know who Perez and Jossip are. SplashNews, though, is the little company that could --they were the ones who snagged the rights to the "drunken stepfather" photographs of Mel Gibson; the ones taken minutes before his DWI arrest and anti-semitic ranting.

David has an excellent recap over at Jossip. He tells of how Bonnie Fuller polygraphs sources on some of their scoops. Crazy! Given that she is the biggest purveyor of gossip-as-cracktainment, this bit of news proves Bonnie Fuller is the Donna of the biggest gossip mafia in the world.

That's so hot!

This being Reuters though, the conversation when from gossip to politics thanks to Mark Foley. And of course, it was used as a moment to bitch-slap "the blogs".

Sigh.

A year ago I debated with Paul Holmes, the chief editor of Reuters global news division, about myths rurrounding blogs. A year has passed, much has happened since, and he's totally hit to blogging. But somehow these panels end up into blogsmears and now the shift is from "bloggers are rookies nobody should pay attention to" to "if Democrats/Lamont/candidate-of-your-choice looses, it will show how "the blogs" can't be trusted".