Lee Siegel was on NPR's On The Media the other day, defending his sockpuppetry and painting all bloggers as unwashed hordes of fascists. Boo hoo.
I listened to the podcast and it was too short to be of much substance. The interviewer has no idea how big of an offense sockpuppetry is, and Siegel demonstrated that, apart from comments on his own blog, he has never really taken a look at the blogosphere as a whole. If the comments on his posts are all he knows, he really knows nothing about blogs. The quip about editors who wink about nobody reading comments is just another proof how ignorant they are of the New Media and what it does. The idea that journalists losing jobs will now turn against bloggers instead of "pandering" to them is just ridiculous - laid off journalists tend to become bloggers and harbor ill feelings towards giant media houses that laid them off in pursuit of profits and reduction of news value.
Siegel has been covered by SciBlings before. Also see Ed Cone and Josh Marshall.
Possibly related:
Old vs. New Media Redux
Those on the Losing End are always the Loudest
Another hit-job on blogs
Michael Skube: just another guy with a blog and an Exhibit A for why bloggers are mad at Corporate Media
Are we Press? Part Deux
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You have to love a story about somebody who believes that blogs are fascist, because of the prevalence of anonymous commenters shouting people down, getting behind an anonymous sock puppet to shout people down. Particularly when his attempt was just so terribly, terribly artless(which made the Courtier allusion absolutely priceless). I was honestly half expecting that it was some sort of blogging variant of the Sokal affair, without the wit and delicacy; but it turned out to just be mindboggling stupid.