The American Mind

John Edwards has been a Presidential candidate who has aggressively used the internet to build support. There’s hardly a social network he isn’t using–YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, even lesser-known sites like Ning, and vSocial.

By jumping into so many social network pools it would seem the campaign understands basic viral marketing. So, this story amazes me for their tone deafness:

A University of North Carolina professor said Friday that John Edwards’ campaign demanded that he pull a student reporter’s television story that focused on the upscale location of the campaign’s headquarters.

C.A. “Charlie” Tuggle, an associate professor at the school, said the Edwards campaign contacted the reporter, second-year master’s degree student Carla Babb, asking for a video of her report to be removed from the Internet. When that failed, the campaign demanded in three calls to Tuggle that the TV story be killed, he said.

Tuggle said the campaign had complained that the reporter misrepresented the story she planned to do. He also said the Edwards campaign warned that relations with the school could be jeopardized.

The Edwards campaign had no comment on the professor’s specific contentions. More generally, spokeswoman Colleen Murray said: “This is silly. We love all reporters, the problem is the feeling isn’t always mutual.”

The TV story is to air Monday on the program “Carolina Week” in Chapel Hill. It was first posted on YouTube for an MTV contest and drew only a couple of hundred hits during the first days on the site.

The Edwards campaign complained to Tuggle, he said, that the student had not disclosed the angle of the story and had asked for access to do a feature on a student who was interning for the campaign.

Here’s the report:

As of today, it’s been watched 81,000 times. How many times would it have been watched had the Edwards campaign not displayed such thin skin?

This online blunder goes right up there with the Obama campaign ripping a popular MySpace page from a dedicated supporter.

Allahpundit takes a different angle:

He’s the candidate of the common man, you see, heroically crusading against the Man’s abuses of power — “the Man” in this case being a grad student who dared offer a balanced report on why the champion of the poor has his campaign HQ in a relatively well-to-do part of town.

As an aside, the funniest part of the story was the UNC columnist calling Jay-Z a “poet,” putting him on par with Shakespeare. Consider it another new low for higher education.

“Edwards Camp Asked to Pull Student Story”

UPDATE: Pete Fanning pointed me to James Edward Dillard’s weblog. Dillard is the UNC student newspaper editor interviewed in Babb’s report who wrote a critical column on Edwards’ HQ. He’s also the Jay-Z fan. He thinks a low-level Edwards staffer wanted to puff themselves up. But according to Babbs it was spokesman Colleen Murray who wanted the story pulled.

Tom Maguire is also watching this story. He is on a mission to get jobs for reporter Carla Babb and James Edward Dillard.