Blog P.I.

[Note: Post updated below. And updated, and updated.]

As covered extensively in the last post, last week TNR joined the Washington Post in the ranks of prominent political paper-based periodicals to get burned by its comment section; writer Lee Siegel’s blog was pulled after the editors discovered he had been posting as his own biggest fan, the artlessly arftful “Sprezzatura.”

Earlier this afternoon, TNR’s Foer went up with an editor’s note/meditation on the future of TNR’s comment section. Unable to arrive at a conclusion, Foer instead settles on drastically overthinking it:

A few months back, The New Republic actually considered requiring Talkback bylines. Our logic went like this: We would never publish an anonymous letter to the editor in the print magazine; in fact, we never publish a letter to the editor without checking the missive’s facts and authenticity. So why should we hold reader opinion on the web to a different standard?

Absent other perfectly good reasons not occurring to me just now, I’ll point out that the two are just not the same, and never have been. Comment sections are moderated, letters pages are edited. Magazines must be forgiven for being choosy, as they have very little space to work with; assuming a comment is on-topic, non-abusive and somewhere in the ballpark of substantive or amusing, it should be allowed. And it goes on like this:

The proposal wasn’t meant to demean TNR’s Talkback section, which has a far higher quality than almost any other example of the genre. Yet, scattered among Talkbalk’s thoughtful posts, you could still find examples of ad hominem attacks and argument that degenerated into taunting. (Some of which, it turned out, were produced by one of our own.)

Unlike the Post at the time of the Deborah Howell controversy, TNR already has comment registration — so that fix is out. But if one apple is bad, should the whole cart be overturned? Unfortunately, in this case the apple is from their own tree (all right, enough with that metaphor) and Foer sounds determined to let that fact ruin everything.

Later in the note, he acknowledges that many potential commenters will drop out before revealing their names. So Foer has just walked into a debate he already seems to have decided he can’t answer: Whether the honesty conferred by anonymity is productive or disruptive. Frankly, the blogosphere itself cannot really answer this question. Some have comments and some do not. Some are attacked for what their commenters say, others are attacked because they didn’t give anyone the chance to say it.

Also, curiously unmentioned in Foer’s meditation: Lee Siegel’s blog is back. All the posts have been returned, even the controversial ones about pedophilia, even the comments by Sprezzatura. I take this to mean that Siegel is not only not fired, he’s cleared to blog again. That’s fine, it’s their call to make. But shouldn’t Foer have included at least a sentence addressing this development?

Update: It’s worth noting that the return of Siegel’s blog seems to fly in the face of the New York Observer’s report, which quotes Foer as saying Siegel’s suspension is “indefinite.” Are some suspensions more indefinite than others? Or is it more likely he actually hasn’t been reinstated, and that the blog’s return is an accident; after all, the last post is dated 8/31, shortly before it was replaced by Foer’s apology. And that apology is pretty firm about Siegel’s blog no longer being published there. What we may have instead is the temporary (?) return of Siegel’s blog as an orphan page, not linked to by any other page on the site. But if you have the URL handy, “Lee Siegel on Culture” is yours for the reading.

Updated again: I am informed by Tyler Green of Arts Journal that Siegel’s blog is not actually back — just the archives. That’s actually what I’d asked for in the previous post; it sounds like they took so much heat for closing off the archives that they decided to open them back up. Good. And so I’ll conclude by going back to how I concluded this post in the first place — Foer’s note is more than annoying, more crucially, it lacks transparency. And in the end, it adds nothing.

Updated one more time: The first and last lines of that Observer piece, the first quoting Siegel, the last quoting TNR literary editor (and onetime Sopranos guest star) Leon Wieseltier, are expecially [Update: This should be a word] telling. Siegel first:

I made a dumb mistake, and I’m very sorry I did it. I took the blogosphere’s bait, and I stooped to the level of these people who were commenting on my pieces, and I shouldn’t have.

If you’re wondering how Mr. Siegel got off on such a bad foot with the blogosphere, look no further. One wonders why he stooped to the level of writing a blog in the first place. Now Wieseltier:

I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.

I would say this very post is evidence of that. Lee Siegel had no business writing a blog in the first place, but Wieseltier sounds like he’d do just fine. Mr. Foer?