Jack Shafer has a very good and fairly Shaferly piece in Slate about the Lee Siegel brouhaha. Or, to be more specific because there are several, the one in which he got his TNR blog deep-sixed for toasting, adoring and defending himself in the guise of the commenter “sprezzatura”.
Shafer’s point or his question is simply: what exactly did Siegel do wrong? Everyone’s anonymous in a comment thread. Why can’t he be too?
I must say that I kind of agree with this. At least, in the narrow sense. Earlier this year the LA Times bounced the blog of business columnist Michael Hiltzik — who, by the way, wrote a really good book about the Social Security wars — for commenting at his and other blogs under a pseudonym. And it really wasn’t clear to me at the time why this should really be such a federal offense.
For the record, the only place I can think where I’ve commented in recent history is at TPMCafe. And there I’m “joshtpm.” So I figure people know who I am. But again, it’s not really clear to me why doing otherwise would be a journalistic breach. I’m not saying it’s okay. But it’s one of those questions that, I think, when you break it down is not completely clear. The reason I don’t do it, I guess, is that at some level it doesn’t seem honest to me, especially when it’s my blog or one like TPMCafe which I run even if I don’t write there that often.
Shafer, at the end of his piece, I think comes back to the real issue with Siegel — not that what he did is so shocking in itself but that his postings (once exposed as his) were so pompous, self-glorifying and morally frivolous that I think Frannk Foer must have just thought he embarrassed the magazine.
If other forms of employment have ‘morals’ clauses, punditry, I think, has a tacit lame-assery clause, which Frank must have thought Siegel violated. Like ‘moral turpitude’, ‘lame assery’ is one of those words which is both vague and endlessly extensible and yet so clear-cut and obvious when you see it right there in front of you.
(ed.note: I consider myself a friend of Foer’s. I’ve never met Siegel.)
