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April 13, 2007BELTWAY BLOGROLL
'Scalping' Standards For The Blogosphere?
In the aftermath of the first blog scandal of Campaign 2008, Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise accused Republican bloggers of "scalping" her fellow feminists, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan Of Shakespeare's Sister.
The scalping term surfaced again this week after CBS Radio fired shock jock Don Imus over allegedly racist and sexist comments he made about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Jeff Jarvis of PrezVid wondered whether people need to be more forgiving of mistakes in an era of "ubiquitous video."
"[M]y fear is that as we see more of each other in ubiquitous video ubiquitously played, we will see more moments of humanity -- that is, screw-ups -- and so we need to decide, rationally, what deserves a scalping and what does not. And we should not be held at the hands of ransom demands from our publicity-crazed, self-appointed guardians of righteousness ... who will hold a press conference and demand a firing if they can get airtime or money out of it."
How true, how true -- and for the blogosphere, too.
In my years of blog-watching, I have been amazed at how quickly today's online watchdogs are to drop the f-word. I'm not talking about the one banned on the airwaves by the FCC; I'm talking about the one spelled f-i-r-e-d, or its face-saving sister, r-e-s-i-g-n. Nary a scandal, real or imagined, goes by without some blogger on the right or the left demanding that so-and-so resign or be fired if he refuses to go quietly.
As Jarvis said, sometimes it's justified. "Imus? Good riddance. Sen. George Allen? Bye-bye now. Trent Lott? He got his proper drubbing. Those are deserved departures from center stage. These public figures were caught at their worst, being themselves, and so they got their justice."
But every controversy does not warrant a firing or a resignation, and demanding as much runs counter to another goal of many bloggers: candor and transparency in politics.
"They will mess up. They will say something in an unguarded moment," Jarvis noted. "Yet we want them to be unguarded. We want them to be human. So when they are human and they do mess up, we can’t demand their scalp for every screw-up.
"We have to judge whether this was merely a mistake or whether it revealed a fatal flaw in their character. And we need to be make that judgment ourselves, not under the threat and deadline of the press-conference piranha. We cannot run politics and the nation by the tyranny of the gotcha moment."
Posted by Danny | 02:54 PM
