Charles has continued to receive tremendous support, and I suspect the glee of his detractors is subsiding. Don't miss James Taranto's excellent piece taking MSNBC to the woodshed.
But the real news is over at Weblog Central itself, where Will Femia is busy trying to backpedal himself out of a sticky and potentially costly situation. The good news: the "news or hate?" coda is gone from the description of LGF. The bad news: the "some may find its content..." language isn't.
Significantly, Femia has spent some time and effort trying to make it sound as though he's just a conduit through which opinions pass with no responsibility for what appears on his site. The most common misconception was that I, as producer of Weblog Central and editor of the Best of Blogs list was on a personal “smear campaign†against this site. They don’t seem to understand that MSNBC.com is not my personal site for my personal agenda. As a communities producer, it is my job to explore, look at, talk about, and yes, even ask questions about the emerging community of Weblogs.
That reply is disingenuous at best. The nature of the inflammatory "questions" that Mr. Femia elected to raise in his discussion of LGF spoke volumes about his personal predisposition. Whether he intended a "smear campaign" or was simply content to be the instrument of one isn't the issue. But there's another hint here.It did strike me as odd that so many advocates of free discussion and “balanced perspectives†would object so strongly to asking questions or even presenting the objections in the first place, but in this instance I accept some of the blame for not considering the audience better in how I phrased the question.
I'll put it politely. Bullshit. First let's pretend the nasty LGF fans are trying to stifle free discussion and then let's denigrate their ability to grasp of the subtleties of your prose. Clever. No smear campaign intended.A few respondents objected to my notation in Friday’s post that some may find LGF offensive or racist. The reason I wrote that was because it’s true. Some HAVE found it to be so and wrote in to say so. The number of letters of support of LGF’s inclusion on the list were vastly greater than those opposed, but I can’t simply deny the existence of opposition.
Uh huh. Some may find Will Femia's explanations to be fatuous, sloppy, insincere and malodorous. I sure do. Reminds me of an old brain-twister: this statement is a lie.
