Watch those blog entries!

Today's Washington Post reminds us how important it is to have a senior staffer monitor and approve the information posted on a candidate website. In the NYC Mayoral race between Democrat Freddy Ferrer, Republican Mike Bloomberg, and other candidates, a posting on the Ferrer website said that he was a product of public schools when in fact he was a product of Catholic schools. This is no small issue in a city where Catholic school families want to vote for one of their own, and where the public schools also have staunch defenders.

[His spokesperson] maintained that Mr. Ferrer did not write the blog entry attributed to him.

"An item submitted by Freddy Ferrer was inaccurately edited regarding Freddy's education," Nick Baldick, the campaign manager, said in a statement. "We apologize for the mistake and have corrected the entry."

Yet even that explanation was not quite right. Jen Bluestein, a spokeswoman for the Ferrer campaign, said the candidate did not submit a written item but rather "passed on some ideas" to an aide, who then wrote three paragraphs and posted them in his name. The prose has a quality that could be confused with Mr. Ferrer's speaking style, but in whole it reads like a news release.

Asked why Mr. Ferrer was credited for words he did not write, Ms. Bluestein offered an everyone-does-it defense. "This happens in political campaigns all the time," she said. "In this case he called in some ideas, and someone got a little loose with the editing."

Another important issue raised by this dust-up: timing. The Bloomberg campaign noticed the error 23 days ago, but waited until Howard Dean was visiting to leak the fact to the press. This then led to many embarrassing questions during the Ferrer-Dean news conference yesterday.

Is there any ethical or other constraint on when an error like that can be revealed? Should there be?