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Tuesday, September 05, 2006

How NOT to get lots of comments on your blog...

Yeow! When some friends first told me about this today, I really wasn't sure what a "sock puppet" was, and to tell you the truth, the guess I had in my imagination was a tad more off-color. I was glad to be proven wrong on that assumption!

So another professional journalist gets his poor ethics exposed, care of blogs and the blogosphere. I just have to point that out, because usually it is professional journalists ranting about the lack of ethical reporting standards in the blogosphere.

Link: New Republic Suspends an Editor for Attacks on Blog - New York Times.

September 4, 2006

New Republic Suspends an Editor for Attacks on Blog

By MARIA ASPAN

A senior editor at The New Republic was suspended and his blog was shut down on Friday after revelations that he was involved in anonymously attacking readers who criticized his posts.

Lee Siegel, creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for tnr.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine after a reader accused him of using a “sock puppet,” or Internet alias, to attack his critics in the comments section of his blog. An editor’s apology replaced the blog on the Web site, announcing that the blog would no longer be published and noting that The New Republic deeply regretted “misleading” its readers.

Franklin Foer, the New Republic’s editor, said in an interview that he first became aware of the accusations against Mr. Siegel on Thursday afternoon, after a colleague noticed a comment in the Talkback section of Mr. Siegel’s blog that accused him of using the alias “sprezzatura” to defend his articles and assail his critics.

["sprezzatura" is a literary term, for art that seems effortless or comes easily]

[...]

In a statement by e-mail, Mr. Siegel said, “I’m sorry about my prank, which was certainly not designed to harm a magazine that has been my happy intellectual home for many years.”

[...]

Mr. Siegel became a polarizing figure, coining the term “blogofascism” in the midst of a debate over The New Republic’s support of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Connecticut primary.

The user named sprezzatura, an Italian term for studied carelessness, posted comments that were hyperbolic even in the blogging environment. After readers criticized Mr. Siegel for his post about the host of “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, sprezzatura wrote: “Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” (A later comment deplored other readers’ “inability to withstand a difference in taste without resorting to personal insult.”)

Mr. Siegel is not the first mainstream blogger to use an Internet alias or the first to be unmasked. In April, The Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of a reporter, Michael A. Hiltzik, after he admitted using aliases on his own blog and other Web sites. Mr. Foer said that as print publications engage the Internet, it can be difficult to clearly define and apply journalistic principles. “Obviously, this all happened in a newer medium where the rules are more ambiguous,” he said. “But we simply don’t tolerate the misleading of our readers.”

September 5, 2006 at 10:14 PM in Bloggers, Chris B, Ethics, Weblogs | Permalink

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