Bloggers Behaving Badly
Joe posted earlier about bloggers and other media figures being nasty to Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards about their recurrences of cancer.
Not long ago, the bloggers hired by the Edwards campaign (Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and my friend Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister) received hate mail and death threats. Even we here at The Moderate Voice were lightly harassed over a post concerning Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith.
A blogger named Cathy Seipp just died and an online enemy attacks her yet again: FOXNews.com – As Cathy Seipp Lay Dying, Her Nemesis Took His Parting Shot on the Web
Tech blogger Kathy Sierra cancels a public appearance due to death threats:Creating Passionate Users: Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations)
Howard Kurtz blogs on the topic of Online Ugliness
Now, someone has proposed a Blogging Code of Conduct
UPDATE: Michelle Malkin notes several cases of bad behavior HERE
23 Responses to “Bloggers Behaving Badly”
Holly,
You make the same mistake as Joe did in his earlier article.
Who was nasty to Elizabeth Edwards?
Joe tried to infer it was Rush Limbaugh, but any fair reading of his comments in context show he had sympathy and best wishes for her. His analysis of how this would affect the campaign was echoed by the evening news anchors without any backlash.
People downthread mentioned that, although in this particular instance, Rush didn’t say anything bad about Edwards, he has a reputation for “obnoxious� behavior. As the most monitored figure in political discourse, if Limbaugh had ever said anything close to the bile being printed about Tony Snow, it would surely be front page news.
This is not a situation where both sides are equally guilty of the offense, and by using sweeping generalizations like: “….bloggers and other media figures being nasty to Tony Snow and Elizabeth Edwards….� lumps both camps unfairly into the same category.
Nothing is going to change until center-left moderates start calling out the more extreme elements of your party to show some common decency.
Jwest, THIS center-left liberal has been putting out that call for years. Rush Limbaugh is nasty on an almost-daily basis but that does not excuse nastiness from the Left.
Holly,
I appreciate your stance on this type of vitriol, but I worry that equivocating for the sake of comity does more to embolden the offenders as opposed to direct specific public condemnation of the guilty party.
Limbaugh is relentless in his ridicule of the left’s lack of ideas, absence of principles and constant hypocrisy, and if you wish to classify this as “nasty� than so be it. However, he does not engage in the type of hateful, death-wish personal attacks evidenced in the material you cited on the left.
By conflating the two, political ideas and personal venom, you tend to stifle the thing we need while enabling the thing we hope to crush.
Holly,
Even though I often disagree with your political views, I have noticed that you are quick to call people from both sides of the spectrum out on this stuff and I really respect you for that.
“The fact that there’s all these really messed-up people on the internet is not a statement about the internet. It is a statement about those people and what they do and we need to basically say that you guys are doing something unacceptable and not generalise it into a comment about this is what’s happening to the blogosphere.” -Tim O’Reilly
The man apparently does not understand logic. The Internet is all about a bunch of sick trolls who go around threatening people anonymously because they cannot do so in the real world.
It says as much about the medium as porno does, or that Newt Minnow’s old comment on TV’s being a vast wasteland did.
Of coursem the fact that Malkin is trying to pose as brave, in the face of sick comments, is laughable, since that is what her whole career and persona is about. This is a woman who has made rermarks about whole groups of people that are far more repugnant than some anonymous threat from an idiot, for there are people who, for whatever reason, actually take her seriously as a scholar of some sort.
[...] Holly in Cincinnati @ The Moderate Voice has more. [...]
Any proposed code is silly, for the allure of the Internet is its Wild West format.
Also, the canards about offensive behavior being a small minority of posts is demonstrably false, and when one adds in stupidity, blatant distortion of facts, sciolism, and on and on, the draw of such a place for passive/aggressive punks who will not use their own names is manifest.
The solution? Simple. Just rhetorically kick their asses- be they a troll, a blogger, or a commenter w a ‘tude. Nothing works better than a dressing down, or exposition.
Having just read the above link at T-Steel’s blog:
http://www.palmtrees.ws/blog/american-politics/199/decency-deficient/
and his response- ‘Fuck you Mr. Bouley for those words. And if your “gutâ€? starts rotting, we’ll see how you feel when someone drops acid on your condition.’- to a comment left elsewhere, there is no small bit of irony.
Now, when some new jackass tells T-Steel that he’s some *^%$&#$@, or the like, then the carousel continues.
Perhaps a little humor is in order. Joe Gandelman, as a performer, has probably had to deal with hecklers, and I ask Joe, ‘Is there any better way to emasculate a heckler/opponent than to really hold them up to ridicule, to the point that an ‘Oh yeah!’ is their only comeback?
The dumber someone is the less a sense of humor they generally have, and the likelier they are to be defeated by the buzzsaw of a guffaw at their expense. No?
Thanks C Stanley!
Cosmoetica said: “The solution? Simple. Just rhetorically kick their asses- be they a troll, a blogger, or a commenter w a ‘tude. Nothing works better than a dressing down, or exposition.”
Cosmoetica…you’re overlooking the tribal nature of the blogosphere, where communities are constructed around the “Ooh-Ooh-Ooh” chants of the likeminded.
George Will had a column this weekend in the Chicago Sun-Times discussing a recent anthropologist’s book about this rise in public anger in American public life. I quote:
“It [anger] has achieved prestige and become ”a credential for group membership…. That type, infatuated with anger, uses it to express identity. Anger as an expression of selfhood is its own vindication. Wood argues that as anger pollutes the social atmosphere, it becomes not a sign of personal uniqueness but of a herd impulse.”
I noted, in the hateful comments directed at Snow at Wonkette, that almost everyone there thought they were delivering top-quality snark, and other people needed to get a sense of humor. Clearly, a community where I…and perhaps yourself…would be dismissed as a troll for pointing out the inhumanity of their “wit”.
These groups will not be defeated. They are likely to grow and feed upon each other’s “righteous” anger.
Re: the Iraq war in general
(also see this post)
Ever since the months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been a few reports in the newspapers that the Central Intelligence Agency was casting aspersions on the intelligence the White House was relying on to justify the war. The CIA has never given a position on whether the war is needed or justified or said that Bush is wrong to go to war. But doesn’t it seem much more likely that the CIA is an extremely right wing organization than a left wing one? After all, even if the people working for them and at least a lot of the leadership really wanted a war for their own reasons, there are a lot of reasons for them to not want to tie their credibility to what they know is faulty information. They and their personnel, present and former, could use other means of promoting the Iraq war, and still be motivated to make the statements in the media. If the CIA got behind faulty information, they would have to make a choice between whether they would be involved in scamming the American people and the world once the military had invaded Iraq and no weapons were found- so: 1) Imagine the incredible difficulties involved in pulling off a hoax that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Imagine all the people you would have to be able to show the weapons to- the inspectors from the UN / the international community, the American press, statesmen, etc. Then imagine the difficulties of substantiating that story to people who would examine it- the lack of witnesses to a production plant that made the weapons or to transportation operations or storage of the weapons during Hussein’s regime of them. 2) If the story fell apart upon inspection or the CIA tried not to hoax it at all, imagine the loss of credibility they would suffer. The CIA, it is safe to bet, does not want to be known to the American people as a group that lies to them to send them to war. Even within the CIA there could be disagreement among people about how involved they should be in promoting the war or the neo-con agenda more broadly, so the CIA would have to worry about lying to and managing its own people after trying so hard to get them to trust their superiors in the agency, and perhaps there simply might be too many people in the agency who knew enough about what was going on in Iraq to know if someone was deceiving people to promote this war.
So there is a lot of reason to be cautious against being seen as endorsing what they knew was false intelligence even if they were very strong supporters of going to war.
Re: prosecutor-purgegate
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10315.html
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/10322.html
What explains the failure of the mainstream media to cover the purge scandal for so long, and so many other scandals? Do you think somebody just set up newspaper editors to cheat on their wives, and threatened to tell if the editors wouldn’t play ball when they come back some day and ask for something?
It wouldn’t be that hard to do, when you think about it. People wouldn’t talk about it.
cosmoetica,
If that new virtual jackass gives me lots of “*^%$&#$@”, I will respond very civilly because the buck stops with me. My visceral reaction is due to having a sister die of cancer and her hateful ex-husband dropping verbal “acid” on her condition. Look, my language was harsh and maybe I spent the carousel faster but I’m not the one making the assertion that Tony Snow’s “gut” is “rotting” because he works for President Bush. Mr. Bouley at Huffington Post attacked a man for a condition he has NO control of. A condition that may kill him. My little push of the carousel is hardly the issue. Mr. Bouley deserves the F-bomb. He doesn’t realize how easy he’s getting off in my opinion.
And I have a great sense of humor. Just not in this case.
A bizarre story and a bizarre reaction to it on this blog.
The story brings up important questions about internet etiquette and whether Mr. Stein violating any laws by incorporating someone’s name into the webaddress of his blog for the purposes of demeaning that person.
I just hope stories like these don’t spur the government to regulate the internet more than they already do now.
NR I wonder how many actually read the Fox article. Whule what Stein did is bad, nobody hacked into the actual site. The Seipp situation sounds like a grudge that turned neurotic, nothing worthy of regulation.
Oh, please, Jwest. Rush led off with implying she and John were impious. Stop.
And by defending his conduct in general, you show your cards as a fool.
The Internet invented hate. Look it up in your gut.
You’d think Will would have cracked a history book. Common fear and loathing is probably the quickest way to define group identity. As it ever was, so shall it ever be.
carp – The Rush Limpbaughs, the Nutroots and hateful Wingnuts stab people in the back because they don’t have to address their victums or look them in the eye as they attack. They are cowards you won’t take a little flack. They piss their pants when Pat Buchanan and Apple Annie Coulter take a pie for the cause. MLK, RFK and Gandhi died for their belief, while not making huge fortunes spreading hate.
Rudi, I wouldn’t be too quick to lump RFK into the same esteemed category as MLK and Gandhi. Those two men preached non-violence throughout their careers, while Senator Bobby Kennedy played a not-insignificant part in planning/approving the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
He may have seen the light eventually. So did Malcolm X, for that matter. But simply seeing the light at a late point does not the equivalent of Gandhi make.
[...] Mar 29th, 2007 by mvdg Holly posted some good links related to my post yesterday about Cathy Seipp’s nemesis and a t-shirt making fun of Tony Snow’s cancer: bloggers, and commenters, behaving like a bunch of savages… and worse. [...]
It is regrettable that certain bloggers and commenters use the internet for hate speech, but a few bad apples do not spoil the whole tree. Countless others have used it to trumpet worthy causes and innovative ideas. Some who are frustrated with our current status quo, use it to vent. I think that it would be great if other sites followed TMV’s example and disallowed personal vindictive, death threats, obscenity ,etc. Hopefully, many who use this form of expression on the web lack emotional maturity, and later will come to regret their lack of restraint.
I share Cosmoetica’s disregard for Malkin’s victimhood- like Coulter, her rants are designed to throw up a red flag for most people, and inflame others
.If RFK evolved later in life- he is to be congratulated for it- so few of us do. Even Conservatives should remember that Ronald Reagan was once a Democratic actor, best known for his antics in “Bedtime For Bonzo.”
Marlowe: I get what you say, but whether it’s a single jackass or a Greek Chorus of’em, you are still responsible for how you react. I’ve gotten booted from arts sites, Left sites, Right sites, because of stating something- be it about an artist, Vietnam, etc., simply because I made someone look silly- if not dialectically, then in mockery.
I’ve sustained death threats and legal threats from the artist community, and NO GROUP is more fucked up than wannabe artists, not even yr avr. Internet troll, and I stillroll on. Youjust need a thick skin and quick wit- think Oscar Wilde before Reading Gaol.