A friend has tipped me to a controversy in the baseball blogosphere — it goes strong even in the offseason — between long-lasting (or maybe just lasting-long) Philadelphia Daily News sports columnist Bill Conlin and the blogger at Phillies-focused Crashburn Alley. Philadelphia magazine’s Daily Examiner blog explains:
What started out as an innocent you suck/you’re old!-type e-mail pissing contest about Jimmy Rollins’s MVP award suddenly turned ugly when Conlin made the unfortunate decision to write this in one of his e-mail responses: “The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth — I’m sure he would have eliminated all bloggers.”
In context, it’s kind of funny, actually, but once Conlin — already an easy target for the online attack dogs due to his propensity to wear his Old Media badge with pride — started name-dropping Hitler coupled with the word “eliminate” to a blogger who’s already pissed off at him, well, he was asking for a pillorying. Headlines talking about how touchy he was instantly morphed into “Sportswriter Praises Hitler in Attack on Bloggers.” Yikes.
We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Conlin’s actions are not the same as those of widely-loathed TNR contributor Lee Siegel — the unlucky will remember that Siegel posed as a fan of his own work in the comments of a TNR blog post last September — but it sounds to me like Conlin is guilty of the same kind of contempt for debate on the web that tripped up Siegel.
We might even call this self-destructive contempt Lee Siegelism. Conlin and Siegel, as others before and after, wrongly think that “anything goes” when it comes to the blogosphere, so they procede to do just about anything they see fit and don’t expect to be called on it. Big mistake. Siegel and Colin certainly are far from being newcomers to journalism, but well into their careers, the media has changed. When it comes to this flatter, meritocratic media age, they’re the newbies. And it turns out they’re the ones who need to learn some respect.
P.S. I’m a Nats fan and reader of Ball-Wonk — so the team from Philadelphia will always be the Phaillies to me.
Foer The Record, Siegel Reinstated [Updated: Or Maybe Not]