So typical of mainstream media reporting today, Jocelyne Zablit's AFP article on the "controversy" over former John Edwards campaign bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan tells only enough to distort reality.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, resigned following outrage over allegedly anti-Catholic rhetoric they had posted on their own blog posts before they joined the Edwards campaign last month.

The 350,000-strong Catholic League, a conservative religious group, had demanded that Edwards fire the two women and threatened to unleash a public relations blitz against his campaign.

The moral of the story? According to Zablit, bloggers are the problem.

--And she's found an "expert" on blogging, who may or may not have a blog himself but does have a book to sell, to back her angle.

"This probably is the year we learn and write new rules about how to integrate all of these new interactive instant media technology such as blogs, Facebook or YouTube into campaigns and elections," David Perlmutter, a professor and associate dean of graduate studies at the University of Kansas school of journalism, told AFP.

"Right now, a lot of people are experimenting and speculating and really just making stuff up as they go along but we're going to learn some lessons ... because nobody has written the rule book yet," added Perlmutter, author of "Blogwars: The New Political Battleground".

Be sure to run out and buy your copy.

Meanwhile, Zablit focuses on Marcotte and McEwan, while giving professional bigot Bill Donohue a pass:

The blog entries and other comments they had posted earned them the wrath of Catholic League president William Donohue who described them as "anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots."

Either "conservative religious group" is code for bigoted, anti-Semitic political hit squad, or such abhorrent behavior as that of Donohue is invisible -- or not "fit to print" -- because of his millions in tax-exempt funding.

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