What's in a name?

by: Eric B.

Sat Jul 05, 2008 at 13:37:19 PM EDT

For those to whom this is going to read vague, I'm going to have to apologize ahead of time for a lack of links to clarify what it is that I'm talking about. This is going to see very much insider-y as it pertains to blogs and bloggers and blogging and blogging traditions. I've been around blogs, bloggers, blogging, and blogging traditions long enough to remember that when Donald Luskin threatened to file a lawsuit against the then-secret identity Atrios that the entire blogosphere -- left and right -- rode to the defense of Atrios.

These days, according to things I've read in the Michigan blogosphere the last couple of days, it appears that someone forgot to get me a memo in which that changed. Today, it appears to me entirely appropriate to divulge people's identities for whatever reason, and not just because someone called you a stalker after you bragged about stalking Paul Krugman.  (By the way, for the curious, this explains the lack of explanatory links ... it is my intention to minimize any damage that has already been done.)

There are a great many criticisms you could hurl against blogs and bloggers, some of which include the tendency to do things like change posts after-the-fact without alerting readers of edits (perhaps in connection with a refusal to acknowledge factural errors), perpetuating rumor and innuendo without evidence, and a general tilt towards using sources that back up what you always thought over things that challenge your point-of-view. There are other things, too, like the habit and tendency to occasionally violate copyright laws and traditions (yes, I did it myself, purposefully and for a point).

Many of those could be substantially reduced by requiring that bloggers use their own name, of course.  But, that's not going to happen, so while you can convene any number of blogger ethics panels or symposiums or even brown bag lunches, there are reasons why people don't want their identities revealed to the public at large.  Most reasonable people who blog recognize that and take seriously the wishes of the other people, being reasonable and all.

Yet, not all agree.  We all know the sad and strange tale of Michelle Malkin, whose work has inspired others to go through the garbage of private citizens in hopes of producing evidence of personal misconduct.  She's also published, on the Web, copies of Cindy Sheehan's divorce papers; and at one point has identified people and their employers that have resulted in terminations.  You are free to lay your judgments where you will, but I place a person who does this kind of thing -- identifies someone's identity and place of employment -- as an inheritor of the tradition of Michelle Malkin.

(Who is this?  I say only that this person also made a savage personal attack against a blogger on this site because he blogged over a line-and-a-half that he didn't always agree with Tim Russert, a point made also by the Columbia Journalism Review and on other blogs, mind you ... just months after this person claimed the mantle of H.L. Mencken, whose most famous work was his scathing, multi-page obituary of William Jennings Bryant; which itself no doubt inspired Hunter S. Thompson's later obituary of Richard Nixon titled simply "He was a crook.")

There are many things that I support. Likewise, there are many things that I reject.  One of those I reject is the alternate course of the universe that is being pushed here.  It is not 2003 all over again, and Donald Luskin has not just stared down the blogosphere in a way that has made it permissable to identify people by their real names unless their identities and places of work are in a wide enough distribution that basically everyone on Earth is in on the joke, which isn't the case here. Corrections are warranted (with appropriate notations that they have been made); apologies are due.  Because I myself have more important things to do (and if they aren't more important, they're certainly more interesting), the guilty -- who know who they are -- are left to police their own conduct.