Richard Cleland, who’s inadvertently become the one employee of the Federal Trade Commission whose name you might recognize if you spend any amount of time in the blogosphere, did a clarifying interview with Fast Company about what the new FTC guidelines regarding commercial endorsements “really” mean for bloggers, starting with the idea that a blogger’s failure to disclose “material connections” with the commercial interests who provide the blogger with consumer goods may result in severe penalties:
“That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law. To the extent that I have seen and heard, people are not objecting to the disclosure requirements but to the fear of penalty if they inadvertently make a mistake.”
Hi, Mr. Cleland; I’m Ron Hogan, the senior editor here at GalleyCat (although my views are not necessarily those of its owner, mediabistro.com) and the founding curator of the literary website Beatrice, and I object to the FTC’s disclosure requirements as defined by your new guidelines. I want to be clear on those last six words—I don’t object to legitimate disclosure requirements for genuine commercially subsidized content. As you say later in the interview, “these rules have applied to consumer endorsers since they were issued in 1980. I don’t think the concept of ‘disclose what I’m being paid’ is a radical concept that is going to be foreign to people.” The problem is that the FTC has defined “what I’m being paid” in such a way as to forcibly redefine an entire class of media outlets as consumer endorsers (although certain exceptions may be established after much wrangling).
[Speaking of how “these rules have applied to consumer endorsers since they were issued in 1980,” I’ve noticed that book publishers frequently run advertisements which include recommendations from authors about books by other authors without mentioning the material connections the endorsing author has with the publisher or the author being recommended. Is that a problem?]“We want to establish a self-imposed ethical standard so people are aware of the conflicts of interest,” you explain to Fast Company. “The bloggers have to look at how they do their blogging, their business practice, and figure out the way that consumers will best get the message that this is a sponsored post.” Drawing purely upon my own limited handling of consumer goods, I’d like to reiterate that a major part of the problem is that, for years, bloggers such as myself, and the publishers who sent us books, believed that what we were doing was independent literary criticism, commentary, and journalism—whether people thought it was good literary criticism, commentary, or journalism is irrelevant—and the FTC has just informed us that what we’ve been doing was writing sponsored posts.
I get that there are people who have been compensated by publishers to “endorse” books online; it was almost one year ago, in fact, that Thomas Nelson unveiled a “Book Review Bloggers” program, which explicitly stated that participants who received books were expected to write about them and to publish what they’d written both on their own website and as a customer review at an online bookstore (although Nelson was careful to declare that it expected honest feedback rather than automatic endorsement). That is sponsored content and should be labelled as such—but it’s also the exception to how book publishers distribute books to bloggers, rather than the rule, and it’s also the exception to the expectations that book publishers have when they send bloggers books for consideration of genuine review.
I’m not going to tell you that every blogger out there has sat down and thought through the full ethical implications of what he or she does, but I think it’s safe to say many bloggers already have “a self-imposed ethical standard” to guide their actions, even if the benchmarks of their standards are at variance with the benchmarks the FTC has now superimposed upon the online media landscape—benchmarks that tell bloggers that even when they conduct themselves in the same manner as print or broadcast media outlets, they will be judged differently.
Some commentators (though not the FTC) have suggested that bloggers should stop complaining, that it’s “no big deal” to add the sorts of disclaimers these guidelines demand. I disagree; not only is it a big deal to have one’s editorial policies mandated by federal regulation, forcing people who are not creating commercially subsidized content to issue pro forma disclosures has existential consequences. “Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them,” we’re told; it’s well and good for a blog, or a newspaper, or a radio station, to determine its own level of transparency with its audience concerning its purely editorial content—but when federal regulation puts words in our mouths at risk of penalty in their absence, those words cease to be plain, honest speech… and threaten to replace our relationship with our audience with a hollow pretense.
Anyway, I just thought you should know people are disagreeing with the FTC’s disclosure guidelines.
[Note of interest: That whole $11,000 fine business? Not so much blogger hysteria as the result of Washington Post reporting.](photo from Natural Products Insider, which is clearly and responsibly labelled as a trade publication)