Last Word On Siegel

To just make a brief point The New York Times seems to have overlooked, while sockpuppetry is bad, being an ass to Ezra Klein not to be approved of, and the "blogofascism" episode absurd, the genuinely problematic thing Lee Siegel did as a blogger was repeatedly smear someone as a pedophile utterly without evidence. I'm not sure whether or not what he was doing amounted to libel, but it certainly seemed close to me.

9/4/06 9:39PM del.icio.us this incoming links

Comments

Yeah, that was what drove him into this last spasm of sprezzatura-izing. When I said I thought what he'd written was actionable, he then accused *me* by name (well, by username) of "admitting to feeling aroused by children" (this because I had written that I thought our cultural sexualizes youth). He demanded in his blog that I reveal my identity ("My dear 'jhschwartz.' You know my name. Why don't you tell us yours? Good old blogospheric anonymity.") And then, as sprezzatura, he began to attack my comments in the threads. That's when I googled around a bit and decided "sprezzatura" was likely Siegel.

Posted by: jhschwartz on September 4, 2006 09:50 PM

Well, I also provoked Siegel by saying some pretty mean stuff about him personally, as well, and calling for him to lose his blog.

Posted by: jhschwartz on September 4, 2006 09:59 PM

jhschwartz,

Must be fun to make the NYTimes. Was the story in print editions too?

Posted by: Petey on September 4, 2006 10:05 PM

Yeah, C4.

No, no fun for me -- I've got a lot of remorse about all this. Siegel, I've since learned, is not just a blockheaded critic, but a genuine complete and utter loon. I wouldn't have ridden him so hard if I'd understood that. I certainly didn't think "sock-puppetry" was a firing offense, or that the crazy sh*t he wrote as "sprezzatura" would be blazoned all over the place.

Posted by: jhschwartz on September 4, 2006 10:23 PM

"I certainly didn't think "sock-puppetry" was a firing offense"

Sockpuppetry and plagiarism are the redlines for bloggers working for established print.

"I've got a lot of remorse about all this. Siegel, I've since learned, is not just a blockheaded critic, but a genuine complete and utter loon."

I guess I can sorta understand the regret. You and another kid on the playground are hitting each other, and a cop comes over to arrest the other guy. It seems excessive for the nature of the game you're playing.

But I'm happy Siegel got taken down no matter what the mechanism. Either give the column to someone sane, or give it to Peretz and thus fumigate The Plank.

His pieces were nothing but a big bowl of wrong.

And the whole saga of his downfall is one of an awful beauty. At the end of the day, he was fired for a lack of sprezzatura.

Posted by: Petey on September 4, 2006 11:28 PM

That's the beauty -- Siegel gets professionally embarassed for being a sock puppeteer, but TNR doesn't embarass itself by having to fire someone over an article that made it to publication. Best just to sweep that particular web-only embarassment under the rug and replace it with a note about the author's personal failings.

Posted by: neil on September 4, 2006 11:39 PM

I gotta say that the meaning of his pseudonym spezzatura -studied carelessnsess- is an indication that he was exaggerating on purpose...

He is a loon and a fool, but I am not sure whether he did this seriously, or as as half-joke as he claimed.

Posted by: Nick Kaufman on September 5, 2006 07:44 AM

It speaks well of you that you don't feel good about the whole thing. Some of the stuff that Kos wrote about this was unseemly. I don't like the idea of taking too much pleasure from the downfall of a guy who was pretty clearly a few fries short of a happy meal. However, I think you are only a proxmiate cause of Siegel's problems. I have to believe that Foer was looking for an excuse to get rid of the guy. That blog was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Posted by: Gabe on September 5, 2006 09:07 AM

Maybe TNR really shouldn't be in the blog game, eh? Between this and Easterblogg's (innocent) anti-semitic-sounding comments, they seem to get someone in trouble pretty regularly.

To say nothing of the publisher's paranoid ramblings.

Posted by: dbt on September 5, 2006 09:34 AM

MY is right about his main point: you hate to see somebody tripped up for the trivial offense when it was the gross offense that should have ruined them.

Kind of like how you hate to see TNR lose its reputation over people like Glass and Siegel, when they should lose it for getting us into the Iraq War, destroying Universal Health Care, and publishing the Bell Curve.

Of course, sometimes you make do with tax-evasion if it will put away Capone....

Posted by: kid bitzer on September 5, 2006 09:47 AM

Well there is a real potential problem for mainstream magazines when they host a blog isn't there? They put themselves in a postion where they get blamed (and potentially could be sued) for what their bloggers write, but don't have any editorial control. I suppose one lesson to be drawn is that they ought to be very careful that they don't give blogs to their more excitable staff members. Some people need an editor.

Posted by: Gabe on September 5, 2006 10:01 AM

Gabe, I'd be ready to agree with you, but the Washington Monthly and American Prospect have both managed to avoid similar embarassment stemming from their in-house blogs. Is there a different editorial model at that pair than at TNR, or is it really just contributors with more discretion? (That's a real question, not rhetorical; I have no idea what the answer is)

Posted by: jfaberuiuc on September 5, 2006 10:18 AM

jfaber, I think the answer is simple. The Washington Monthly hired someone who already had a well-regarded blog of his own. The best bloggers at the Prospect -- Ezra, Charles Pierce, and until last week our gracious host -- were similarly already established bloggers when they came on board. (As for the other TAPPED contributors, I'm afraid they avoid embarassment at the cost of mediocrity.)

That's the model print publications that want blogs should look for -- a symbiotic relationship with an existing blog, rather than assuming a competent print writer will be a good blogger.

Posted by: lemuel pitkin on September 5, 2006 10:29 AM

what lemuel said, but, since I'm a policy wonk in real life, I'll also add that you have to look at the issues of incentives within the different organizations, which are also reflected in the work that goes through the editorial process. My guess is that the incentives you see at TAP are different from those at TNR, in a way that results in TNR writers being slightly more susceptible to these sorts of issues.

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