Dean Campaign Admits to Spam, Severes Relationship with provider

News.com reports that the Dean cam­paign acknowl­edge it had spammed peo­ple on the Inter­net. Infre­quent read­ers can find my sto­ries on the sub­ject here, here, here and there. What I find most inter­est­ing is that the news has been mak­ing the rounds in the blo­gos­phere for a cou­ple of weeks by now. My first entry is dated August 5th and the spamver­tized arti­cle is about a week old. Once more, it seems that blogs are trump­ing reg­u­lar news orga­ni­za­tions when it comes to bring­ing break­ing news to the public.

Also of inter­est is the story itself. The Dean cam­paign is quoted saying

On Tues­day, August 12th, Dean for Amer­ica received noti­fi­ca­tion from a sup­porter that spam was being sent. We ter­mi­nated our rela­tion­ship with both ven­dors immediately.

What I find most inter­est­ing here is that I received the piece of spam on the 5th of August, emailed it to the Dean’s blog then (fig­ur­ing I would get a response quickly). With no response on the ini­tial email, I emailed them a link to my blog entry ask­ing for com­ment and am still wait­ing for an answer.

The arti­cle con­tin­ues with

The Dean campaign’s bulk e-mail, which was sent last week,

The arti­cle is dated August 18, which means that last week would have been, at the ear­li­est, August 11. Are we talk­ing about sep­a­rate pieces of spam here?

The last piece of the arti­cle I have a beef with is the following:

The Dean cam­paign did not imme­di­ately respond to ques­tions about which e-mail con­trac­tors it hired, what kind of “opt-in” lists the con­trac­tors promised or how many per­sons’ in-boxes were affected.

Just look­ing at both the spamver­tized arti­cle and my own entry on the sub­ject, the reporter could have had that infor­ma­tion in the story, even if the Dean cam­paign did not pro­vide the info.