«
»




Apr

20

Hiltzik & the LA Times Can Run . . .

Posted By: 'Okie' | 6:53 pm — 4/20/2006 | Comments Off See comments below:

. . . but they can’t hide, either!

Although the LA Times has supposedly taken down the Michael Hiltzik blog, if you know where to look, you can still find his post On Anonymity in Blogland where Hiltzik tries to slam Patterico’s bust on Hiltzik’s use of multiple pseudonyms to praise himself on his own blog and others, and to blast those that blasted him. If that goes down, I’ve done a screen capture, a part of which you can see here, and the full item is available here, including all the comments. (Sorry about the image quality, it’s a big pic and bandwidth can get expensive! I’ve got a tip jar for that . . .)

Here is Hiltzik’s post in it’s entirety, just in case, well — you know . . .

On Anonymity in Blogland

Some years ago, the New Yorker ran an amusing cartoon about one of the supposed virtues of the Internet, its anonymity. It showed two dogs in front a computer. One was saying to the other (I am working from memory), “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

The right-wing blogger Patterico has apparently worked himself into a four-star ragegasm (Tbogg’s inimitable coinage) at the notion of anonymous or pseudonymous postings on his website by me. This is amusing, because most of the comments posted on his website are anonymous or pseudonymous. “Patterico” is itself a pseudonym for an Assistant Los Angeles District Attorney named Patrick Frey. Anonymity for commenters is a feature of his blog, as it is of mine. It’s a feature that he can withdraw from his public any time he wishes. He has chosen to do that in one case only, and we might properly ask why. The answer is that he’s ticked off that someone would disagree with him.

Set alight by my recent post tweaking Hugh Hewitt for his numbskulled method of analyzing newspaper economics and newspaper circulation, two subjects about which Hewitt claims omniscience and knows nothing, Frey evidently pored through the IP addresses of comments on his blog to discover that sometimes I commented under my own name, and sometimes under a pseudonym. He noticed that this is a pseudonym I’ve used on other occasions. He pats himself on the back (so to speak) for his brilliant sleuthing.

He seems to think that pseudonymous posting is deceptive, though he can’t articulate why that should be, given the abundance of pseudonyms and anonymity on his own blog starting with the name on the banner. He makes a stab at rationalizing his selective exposure of one out of his scores of pseudonymous commenters by complaining that my comments were “acid-tongued” or “insulting.” This is a curious cavil, given the overall tone of his blog, characterized by his pigeonholing of his postings about “left-wing” newspapers (among other targets) under the category “morons,” his habit of accusing editors and writers of the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers of deliberately slanting news articles, and the coded racism of his rants about illegal immigration. But then, one of the defining characteristics of Frey’s style is the casual attribution of moral and intellectual faults to others that he exhibits in stupendous measure himself.

Is it so unusual for Frey to have pseudonymous postings on his blog? Let’s consider this post, where as Frey remarks that I got into a donnybrook with another commenter. What he disdains to mention is that of the 259 comments on that post, at least 230 are pseudonymous—including those of the commenter with whom I was tangling. (That’s assuming that commenters “Eddie Haskell” and “Jim Rockford” aren’t using their own names.) Frey’s other comment threads generally show about the same ratio. For the record, this blog also offers commenters anonymity, although our approach to it is a bit different from Frey’s: We don’t “out” anonymous commenters who disagree with us.

But Frey doesn’t really have an issue with pseudonymous posting. If he did, he could eliminate it from his blog with the click of a mouse button. By offering anonymity, does he implicitly commit himself to honoring it? I’d say so. Otherwise, he’s telling all his site visitors and commenters that they visit and post at their peril; if he doesn’t like what they say, he’ll invade their privacy (and concoct a “principled” pretext for doing so).

Of course, his real goal isn’t to make all his commenters disclose their real names or to delve into the ethical and moral dimensions of Internet anonymity. It’s to quash debate on his blog. His sensitivity to criticism has been evident ever since he was first confronted with it—in a pair of postings here this year in which I serially demolished his supposed proofs of the Times’s supposed bias. One of the most easily-goaded bloggers on the right, he’s never recovered from the shock of being challenged.

The Patterico comment threads are generally filled with quacking lunatics agreeing with each other, punctuated by the occasional voice of reason. Now those few dissenting voices will disappear, because Frey has signaled a new policy on anonymity: that it’s granted, but only if you toe the Patterico Party Line. Why should anybody subject themselves to his selective exposure?

No doubt his claque of commenters will be expressing unanimous praise for Patterico’s detective work in the days to come, and he’ll be basking in the kudos. I hope his remaining readers are happy together. As Patterico’s Pontifications continues its journey toward the paradise of enforced harmonious thought, it will simply become another blog empty of relevance to anyone else. And that’s as it should be.

Patterico continues spanking the LA Times by chastizing them for taking the blog down, because now readers can’t make their opinions known about this important breach of ettiquette.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that Times editors realize that their mistake was not the decision to allow a staff writer to operate a blog — it was the choice of Michael Hiltzik as that blogger. I hope that this is not the end of the paper’s experiment in using the Internet to interact with its readers. It is a noble experiment, and I want to see it continue.

The MSM has a lot to learn, and not all that much time left to get it done . . . (db)

Technorati Tags: , ,

Sphere It
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Blogger News, Media Doin' It Wrong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |  Print This Post Print This Post  |  Email This Post Email This Post

Recently Posted:


Comments are closed.