VITAMEDIAS
The Great Blogging Ethics Debate: The war in Iraq put blogs in the public spotlight, but it also has given the blogosphere its first real scandal - a scandal that is provoking a new debate among bloggers about what ethics, if any, apply to their medium. [...]
Blogs and bloggers of all stripes, whether or not they like this fact, have become part of the journalistic discourse. That hasn't stopped many bloggers from contending that they are not practicing pure journalism and therefore are not governed by the same ethics. This is a slippery-slope argument. Many bloggers say they want to be accepted by the mainstream media as another facet of public discourse, but this seems to be a hard goal to achieve if plagiarism, a cardinal sin in the world of journalism, is brushed off as a minor offense (or no offense at all). Just because blogs are a "free medium" doesn't mean that rules of playing fair need not apply.