Blogging ethics

I attended a session last night about the comparative ethics of blogging and mainstream journalism. The session centered around a recent article about a L.A. Times columnist who was caught pseudonymously making politically charged comments on a blog.

The talk centered around the question of whether or not this action was ok. Many of the bloggers on the panel (and students in the room) appeared to believe that there was no ethical conflict for the columnist, since he was doing this on his own time and made an extra effort to distance himself from his employer.

What I took away from the session (admittedly confirming some of my previous beliefs) was the increasing importance of the editor in our new mass communication landscape. Institutional mass communicators like newspapers and television stations have processes, people, and the persona of the institution in place as ethical guards. Many bloggers, on the other hand, have only themselves to answer to. In this way, it seems to me that while blogging may technically be mass communication, this lack of additional blocks makes their actions more like that of an individual speaker (note that even the panelists who reviewed submissions/blogrolls did little of this editing, with a few exceptions).

Should this mean that bloggers should be held to a lower ethical standard? If so, should this be extended to legal standards? Is it then the readers’ responsibility to make these distinctions? How can mass communicators and bloggers possibly manage these expectations?