Michael Hiltzik Deep-Sixes Blog Posts? Or Mere Technical Glitch? (UPDATED: It’s a Glitch)
[Note: Make sure to see the UPDATE at the end. The missing posts are indeed the result of a technical glitch.]
L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik has a new blog, hosted by the paper. It has comments, and Hiltzik responds to many of the comments. Like most L.A. Times staffers, he leans left — this much is obvious both from his blogroll and from a recent interview he did with Hugh Hewitt (transcript here). But I am thrilled to see an L.A. Times staffer interacting with the public in this way.
However, I am a little baffled that several recent blog posts of his appear to have disappeared without explanation. I hasten to say, up front, that it may be a mere technical glitch. I have written Hiltzik to ask. But there are definitely several posts — and comments to those posts — missing from the site.
If you look at the Google cache of his site, you see that there was a post titled “Mickey Kaus stoops to condescend” published on December 12. It’s gone, as is a seemingly innocuous post from December 11 titled “Golden State Column: Who Owns Your CD/DVD Collection?” The cache doesn’t have it, but there was also a post yesterday announcing Hiltzik’s column on immigration. That’s gone too.
A fourth post that disappeared was particularly interesting: an after-action report about Hiltzik’s interview with Hewitt. (Hiltzik’s pre-interview announcement of the upcoming interview remains on the site, but the post-mortem, previously available at this link, is gone.) The cached version of the post-mortem is here, but several comments didn’t make it into the cache.
One of the comments missing from the cache was a (perhaps overly) blunt comment by me, asking Hiltzik why he was so reluctant to say who he had voted for in the presidential election. Hiltzik responded with a long comment that largely responded to an argument I hadn’t made: that knowing one’s presidential vote tells you everything you need to know about that person. Hiltzik was eager enough to have me read his response that he reproduced it as a comment to this blog in a tangentially related thread; you can read that here. Here’s the text (it’s long, so I’m putting it behind the extended entry):