By ignoring what blogging is about, The Wall Street Journal has created a scandal out of whole cloth.

Here's the conflation, in a nutshell. Journalists can blog, and blogs can be journalism. Thus many journalists assume all blogging is journalism.

Uh, wrong. Much blogging, perhaps most blogging, is anything but journalism. Experts can blog, executives can blog, little children can blog, players in a story can blog about the games they are playing.

Thus, Rebecca Buckman's "story" claiming corruption in that Fon has a number of bloggers on its advisory council, who blogged about Fon once the company announced its entry into the market.

She hangs her charge on a single dubious claim by The Poynter Institute, which does have some claim on journalists but not on anyone else:

Some lawyers and academics with expertise in the Internet said the disclosures by the FON advisers were adequate and appropriate. But Bob Steele, an ethics specialist with the Poynter Institute, a journalism organization in St. Petersburg, Fla., says bloggers with financial ties to companies -- disclosed or not -- have "competing loyalties" that could taint their independence as writers. "It's still a problem," he says. While many bloggers don't consider themselves journalists, anyone putting information into the public domain about people or companies has certain ethical responsibilities, Mr. Steele says.

Over at Roughtype, Nicholas Carr calls this "unsavory buzz."

Some news for Nick, Rebecca, and the rest:

• In nearly all cases, the bloggers were very clear they were on the advisory board in their blog posts.
  
• If a journalism scandal exists here, it was that writers held off on writing about Fon until Fon said it was OK, not that they wrote about it.

By claiming all blogging is journalism, then saying bloggers must all behave as journalists, people like Buckman ignore the fact that her employers are not subject to those ethics, that her employers routinely negotiate the placement of stories based on business considerations, and her employers never reveal these conflicts.

I don't know whether Fon will make it. A lot of folks with similar ideas have already failed in the market. But to claim that anyone who writes a blog is constrained from providing their insight into the story, journalists do themselves and their professions a disservice.

One should not have to take a vow of poverty in order to write something. Tell us about your relationship to everyone you write about, and you're ethically fine.