Blog P.I.

Note: As previously mentioned, when I go international next week, my old friend and onetime colleague Olly Ruff will be taking over this space, live from Down Under. While he gets used to the prospect of posting for an audience on the other side of the world, and as I get ready to depart, he’ll be filing a few guest posts. Here’s one:

There’s still a sense that a blog-fight hasn’t really made the big time until it hits the paper-based media, and the saga of Deb Frisch, former Psychology adjunct at the University of Arizona, has now crossed that Rubicon. As is now a matter of record, Frisch enthusiastically trolled the oft-trolled comments of Jeff Goldstein’s Protein Wisdom, and eventually escalated matters to the point that she was making tasteless comments about Goldstein’s two-year-old son. Frisch abruptly announced her resignation, and the story kept going from there.

Although most lefty observers pointed out that they had never heard of Frisch, she didn’t materialize from thin air, she was not a right-wing stooge, and her antics chez Goldstein were not particularly unusual by her own bizarre standards. (Try this Crooked Timber thread, for instance.) Certainly, everyone who is not crazy can agree that Frisch’s comments were reprehensible. On the other hand, they could not be reasonably interpreted as a threat (to his credit, Goldstein pointed this out himself) and anyone who wastes their lives in comment sections has seen much worse. So how did things progress to the point where Deb Frisch is in the newspaper?

Well, it’s partly because she wouldn’t shut up; between comments at Protein Wisdom and posts on her own blog (which continued for days after she ran up the white flag), she invited a lot of the initial attention she got. Even without her continued interaction, though, it seems likely that there still would have been a substantial response. There’s something a little disturbing about the sanctimonious glee with which large groups of people set about things like the hounding of Deb Frisch. Reading back through the weekend’s comment sections, there’s an almost palpable sense of liberation: it suddenly became acceptable to say anything to or about this rather sad woman, simply because she had supposedly threatened the life of a child. If we’d all simply shrugged her off as another demented troll, there would have been no such license, and it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun for everyone.

Of course, there are other interpretations. The American Spectator opens their write-up of the GoldFrisch matter with:

Score another one for the bloggers. Not only did the pajama pundits blow the whistle on Dan Rather’s misrepresentation of the president’s Air National Guard record (Rathergate), and CNN correspondent Eason Jordan’s false accusations that U.S. servicemen intentionally targeted and killed journalists in Iraq (Easongate), but last week the blogs Protein Wisdom and Blackfive outed a potentially dangerous leftist university professor.

This is, to put it politely, a stretch.

Before all the hysteria really got going, Goldstein said (in a spirit worthy of applause):

When I’m done with you, Deb, you’re going to be an internet verb.

He held up his end of the deal. Time will tell whether it sticks: but now, for a brief shining moment, Deb Frisch has inadvertently made herself the latest proxy for the ongoing battle between blogs of left and right, just like Ben Domenech was before her. And if there’s one sure thing, it’s that we’re going to see her like again.