When you do a "tell-all", ya gotta tell ALL

Last week, we told you about Mike McGavick - GOP candidate for US Senate in Washington - who used his blog to do a tell-all mea culpa about some past personal indiscretions.

At the time, we warned about the dangers of trying to appear forthcoming without actually being fully forthcoming:

Of course, as with all tell-all mea-culpas, there's one looming risk. The other shoe.

Well, it appears that McGavick did exactly that. From National Journal's Beltway Blogroll:

Nearly two decades ago, the presidential campaign of Democratic Sen. Gary Hart self-destructed when the Coloradoan invited reporters to investigate rumors that he was a womanizer. The Miami Herald took him up on the offer and proved Hart wrong when he said "they'd be very bored."

A couple of weeks ago, Washington Senate candidate Mike McGavick, a Republican, encouraged similar press scrutiny with a confession by blog about an arrest for driving while intoxicated. While he scored points in the blogosphere then for his transparency, he is catching some heat from the mainstream media now for not being completely forthright in his account of the arrest.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer obtained a police report of the incident that the newspaper said shows McGavick "was less candid than he seemed last week when he disclosed a previously unknown arrest for drunk driving."

Of course, this might just be a case of the mainstream media being annoyed about losing a story to the blogosphere -- but more likely, with blood in the water, the sharks swarmed.

We still think it's a good strategic move to release your bad news on your own blog (especially in the week before a holiday weekend) -- but you gotta release all the bad news, and whatever you do, don't taunt the press.