[Post Title Changed, as I Can't Stomach It Anymore]

Some background: for two years, a woman named Brittney Gilbert ran a blog called Nashville Is Talking for local news affiliate WKRN.  The stated goal of the site:

As the name suggests, Nashville Is Talking is a blog devoted to the daily conversation that takes place in and around the Greater Nashville community.  If it’s being discussed in Music City, we hope you’ll find it here.

NIT has pretensions of reportage.  Rare as blogs go, I know, but utterly ordinary in the world of local news, where KKK rallies are covered without anyone thinking the coverage tantamount to an endorsement.  This goes without saying ... as does the fact that daily conversations in Tennessee (as everywhere) often violate whatever passes for social decorum today.

Case in point: any conversation in which the folks who write here participate likely contains material liberals find offensive.  As two of the authors of that site are from Nashville, it qualifies as something "being discussed in Music City," so Gilbert regularly—one could say dutifully—linked to it.  So when one of its authors posted a disgustingly racist obituary for the liberal blogger Steve Gilliard, she linked to it ... just as she earlier linked to other local reactions to his death.  Such is the nature of reportage. 

Today she tendered her resignation on account of the response of the response to her dutiful post by non-readers of NIT.  One of those non-readers, Jesus' General, used his not inconsiderable influence to inform Gilbert's employers that she had done her job:

Now I know your blogger, Brittney, isn't the author of those lines, but she deserves a lot of credit for republishing it without comment and thereby repackaging it as a WKRN 2 Nashville product.

When she responded that her link wasn't an endorsement, the General added:

Apparently, Brittney is just plain fucking stupid. I'm told she posted it to expose the original blogger's hatred.

She need not have even claimed that she wanted "to expose the original blogger's hatred," since NIT was intended to be a clearinghouse for information concerning what Nashville is talking about.  Were I paid to write about what bloggers in Orange County were writing, I'd frequently link to material I found offensive.  Not because I approve of it—I find much of the conversation on local Orange County blogs offensive—but because I had been hired to to write about what bloggers in Orange County were writing.

From what I can gather, Gilbert put her own politics aside in order to do her job.  People who publish with Blogger?  No such constraints.  They're free to link to whatever and whomever they choose.  Unsurprisingly then, their default logic is link-as-endorsement.  Had Jesus' General and its readers bothered to read NIT on its own terms—had they bothered to understand the context of the remarks instead of relying inapplicable conventions, Gilbert wouldn't have been vilified and wouldn't have been forced to resign. 

Context is important.  Without it, distortions abound.  (I say this in my official capacity as literary scholar.)  Normally such statements are merely academic; in this case, someone lost her job not because of what she had written, but because of what people who lacked knowledge of its context and the desire to discover it—a damning combination—misinterpreted it.  Not only that, they misinterpreters now insist that their ignorance is Gilbert's fault ... just as they'll insist their misprision of this post's title will be mine.  The fact that it comes from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman will not merely escape them, they'll insist that their unfamiliarity with the conventions of Acephalous justifies their misplaced outrage.

Or maybe it won't.  Maybe the obviousness of the context here will convince them to back off.  I have my doubts, but what more can you do than doing what you can?
 

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

Luther, I'm nto sure what her superiors really should have told her that she didn't really already know. Be extra careful not to appear callous in connection with someone's death? She claimed that she made a serious mistake because she was burned out. I find that believable.

Scott is of course right when he says that this incident was the straw that broke the camel's back, but this incident didn't, by her description, generate the entire pile of straw. I do think that there is a connection to the Edwards blogging scandal in that sense -- that bloggers are taking on jobs that they aren't really ready for in one way or another, or that their habits prepare them for poorly.

[Joseph Kugelmass]

I've read through as many of these links as I can stand, trying to find the thread that will help me understand Brittney's reasoning, and so far I've had no luck.

If her post is a piece of sarcasm, it's worthless sarcasm. It's the equivalent of a six-year old repeating what you've just said in an annoying voice.

We have to hold her to some kind of consistent standard here: either she's trying to articulate a political viewpoint, or she's aiming for journalistic objectivity.

If the former, she is obviously not doing a very good job. Piny linked to a bunch of Feministe posts that were supposedly similar to "Teaching Libs a Lesson," but all of them had at least a few lines of decipherable content.

If the latter, then objectivity demands a disclaimer. Smantix is not "remembering" Gilliard, he's slandering him. Tomemos had it right: the act of selecting something has to be justified or explained, just as it is in every New York Times article. We already have a Google, including Google Alerts (e.g. set to "Nashville"). The Times doesn't assume that just because it has printed an editorial against intelligent design, every new article on intelligent design can assume a readership familiar with the editorial, and it also doesn't entirely identify editorials with reportage.

But this gets us back to the question of context: if, understood in context, Brittney's message was just "this is stupid," that was stupid, and counter-productive since it inflates Smantix's readership.

[R.L.Page]

Having observed the behavior of Orange County natives in the wild on a number of occasions, I can only imagine (with horror) what they might be capable of doing with computers.

But that's not what I wanted to say.

Someone (above) carelessly put the initials 'JG' and 'dick-swinging' in close proximity, and unless you're looking for a serious Authorial Intent Smackdown, you might want to avoid doing that again. (The man has mad Google skillz; or so I'm told.)

[Michael Richards's Career is Calling]

"It may have happened," said Richards. "I'm a performer. I push the envelope. I work in a very uncontrolled manner on stage. I do a lot of free association — it's spontaneous, I go into character. I don't know. In view of the situation and the act going the way it was going, I don't know. The rage did go all over the place - it went to everybody in the room."

Richards seemed baffled by his own reaction on stage.

"I'm not a racist, that's what's so insane about this," he said.

...

Industry colleagues were in no hurry to accept Richards' apology.

"Once the word comes out of your mouth and you don't happen to be African-American, then you have a whole lot of explaining," comedian Paul Rodriguez, who was at the Laugh Factory during Richards' performance, told CNN. "Freedom of speech has its limitations and I think Michael Richards found those limitations."

Veteran publicist Michael Levine, whose clients have included comedians George Carlin, Sam Kinison and Rodney Dangerfield, called Richards' remarks inexcusable. Comics often face hecklers without losing their cool, he said.

"I've never seen anything like this in my life," Levine said Monday. "I think it's a career ruiner for him... It's going to be a long road back for him, if at all."

Comedian Sinbad was in the audience at the Laugh Factory that night. "(Richards) went crazy," he said on CNN's "Anderson 360," "He kept going and going."