Below The Beltway

James Joyner posts an open letter on political spam that I wholeheartedly agree with

I am writing to express my concern for a recent trend that has been increasing over the last several months, namely, the sending of inordinate numbers of press releases via electronic mail to a mass mailing list. Given that you are considering legislation to rid America of the scourge of spam and knowing that the Contact With America that helped bring the current Republican Majority to power in 1994 promised to apply all laws that apply to citizens to Members, I thought I should bring it to your attention that many of us in the Blogosphere consider this practice to in fact be spamming.

Count me among them. Even though I am a low-traffic blogger, I’ve found myself added to mailing lists established by more than one politician and/or his or her staffer, including one Congressman and the Attorney General of Virginia. I suppose there is some rationale in all of this; perhaps their staffers think that bloggers will write more about the people they work for if they are kept “in the loop.” Maybe, in some case, it works. I get daily emails from Virginia Attorney General Robert McDonnell’s office, and at least one or two a week from Congressman Eric Cantor’s office. Sometimes I read them, more often I don’t, but I can honestly say I’ve never written a blog post based on any one of those emails. And I can’t say that I’ve noticed anything from any of the other Republican-leaning Virginia bloggers that looks like its been inspired by one of these emails.

What is really starting to annoy me, though, is how many of these emails I’m getting. And, apparently, I’m not alone:

There is also the issue of frequency. Hint: More is not better. If you have sent out seven or eight messages before noon and something on the scale of the 9/11 attacks has not happened today, you have sent at least six or seven too many messages.

Even when very important things have happened, I don?t want a statement from each of you giving me your take. I take it as a given that you?re happy, for example, when we kill the top terrorist leader in Iraq. Only send me a press release if you?re unhappy about it. If you just really, really need a few bloggers to post that you?re happy about something that is obviously good news, get together with your caucus and have someone (preferably, the Majority Leader, since he?s already on my spam list) compile all the quotes into a single release that I can delete.

Or, to use another example, I don’t need to know the Attorney General’s schedule for next week, or what Laura Bush had to say when she visited Richmond this week. And those are only two examples of the political spam I’ve received this week.

Politicians are treating bloggers like we’re journalists from the New York Times. That only proves they still don’t get it. I write about what interests me. Feeding me press releases doesn’t accomplish anything.