Walmart/Edelman's tactic of feeding PR material to bloggers in the hope they buzz about it is not a pollution of the space but an inevitable consequence of the rising power of consumer generated media.

New York Times article here.

"In the messages, Wal-Mart promotes positive news about itself, like the high number of job applications it received at a new store in Illinois, and criticizes opponents, noting for example that a rival, Target, raised "zero" money for the Salvation Army in 2005, because it banned red-kettle collectors from stores."

See Richard Edelman's comments here.

Bloggers are increasingly being earmarked as important sources of social comment and its an inevitability that they start getting treated like journos by some agencies. Personally I don't think there's an issue with the ethics of the approach - at least not from the agency side. Who asks journalists to declare which press releases they've used to bash out a story? And if a blogger is copy and pasting content willy nilly, what long term credibility does he/she have anyway? Its self-policing in the long run. If they start acting like too much like journos I think they are on a looser anyhow.