A couple days ago I raised an eyebrow — okay, both eyebrows — at a blog hosted by the Cincinnati Enquirer‘s online division, Cincinnati.com.
Titled “Grandma in Iraq,” the blog is an unvariably upbeat diary of U.S. successes in the effort to rebuild Iraq.
It’s written by a Public Affairs Officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Suzanne M. Fournier. Except the site didn’t identify her job, and Fournier appeared to have mentioned it specifically only once in the last several months.
Folks called, Editor and Publisher got involved, and now the site has changed her attribution — it reads:
Suzanne Fournier of Alexandria, grandmother of 15, posts from Iraq. Fournier is the Public Affairs Officer for the Gulf Region Southern District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Iraq.
The disclosure is nice to see. I’m still curious to hear from media ethics folks on how they think readers are served by giving a government flack access to publish directly to a newspaper’s Web site.
