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My navel is amazing! |
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm avoiding by ditching the dead weight from UAC and not allowing comments. For those of you who don't click links or can't figure out BugMeNot, I'll run down the high points. There's a site called The Huffington Post. Near as I can tell, it's Blogspot with delusions of credibility.
The story goes that former Pfizer exec turned internet fancy-pants Dr. Peter Rost wrote about some PR firm that was contracted to sell the war in Iraq by various means including posting on the internet, maybe even in his very own blog(!), and subsequently got heckled in the comments by what he termed a "troll." Buried, it should be noted, in a veritable sea of unabashed fanboi praise and awestruck pillow biting. But one disrespectful peasant had the temerity to question the good doctor's credulity, and he would not rest until he got to the bottom of the caper.
Doctor Rost tracked down and unmasked his verbal assailant through a variety of convoluted IP lookups and web searches. He eventually deduced that the comments were coming from inside The Huffington Post. I just went to Google and typed in "yacomink", the so-called troll's nickname, and the second hit was this page: Andy Yaco-Mink's blog on The Huffington Post. But far be it from me to question the Googling ability of a doctor, especially one who uses [sic] when he quotes people. What if he [sic]'s me?
Now, it should be noted that Mr. Yaco-Mink didn't just post negative and mocking comments to Doctor Blog, he also marked his own comments as "Reader Favorites." But in his defense, he's a tech guy and he works at one of the most pretentious blog sites on the internet. It's his job to provide technical assistance to professional whiners. Surely he can plead diminished capacity.
From there, the situation devolved into typical forum name-calling and censorship. Rost demanded satisfaction. Site founder Arrianna Huffington huffington'd and puffington'd and blew Rost's blog down. Rost took his ball and went home (where you can probably still hear him whining about it to this day). Yaco-Mink, like any good troll, is presumably giggling over his keyboard. HAND.
What makes this story interesting, aside from the fact that it got covered in the New York fucking Times, is that it shows how internet culture infects everything it touches, even a site with journalistic aspirations. Regardless of what one might consider the strengths of blogs, one of the things they all seem to do at one point or another is make private experiences public. For the huge majority of us, that just means exposing at great length how utterly banal our day-to-day existence really is. For those with a bit of credibility or celebrity, however undeserved, the sissyfighting becomes a spectacle and a scandal.
I'm sure this sort of immature backbiting has gone on at newspapers and magazines since the invention of the printing press. The difference is that today's pseudojournalists and faux-editors engage in their schoolyard insults on the front page rather than the back room. Imagine if the first mass-produced run of the Bible had "Guttenberg is a fag" sneaked onto the inside cover.
I for one don't want to read about office politics in the New York Times, or see an entire issue of People gossiping about the people who work at People. If bloggers want to have the same kind of credibility as real journalists, they need to start acting more like real journalists, which is to say grow the hell up. Of course, what's really happening is that journalists are acting more like bloggers.
Which was pretty much inevitable, if you think about it. The internet at large is always at least five years behind the porn industry, and what is a blog except a low budget, grainy, amateur hand-held version of real journalism? This site, obviously, is slightly ahead of the curve with the addition of the literary equivalent of clit-slapping and ATM. Surely it will lead to massive ad revenues and an inevitable buy-out by Rupert Murdoch.
