Patterico's Pontifications

12/16/2005

Michael Hiltzik Deep-Sixes Blog Posts? Or Mere Technical Glitch? (UPDATED: It’s a Glitch)

Filed under: Blogging Matters,Dog Trainer,Hiltzik — Patterico @ 7:12 am



[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):

A bit off topic, but this is a response to the comment you left at my blog:

Dear Pat:

What I don’t get is this fetish Hugh has (and you too) with having reporters reveal their Presidential votes. As I said on his show, I don’t believe it necessarily tells you anything you’d find useful. It feels to me like an exercise in public confessional, like the naming-names fetish of the 50s red-baiters. Hugh asked me my position on a handful of specific issues; I told him. (Though his interrogation was only semi-competent—he asked my position on embryonic stem cell research, but not Proposition 71, and they’re opposite). But people vote for president for a complex of reasons—his positions, “warmth,” persona, his opponent, his incumbency (or lack of it), etc., etc. Do you really think you can know everything about my perspective and outlook just by knowing how I voted for president?

What really exposes this idea as shallow and childish is your assertion that you actually know how I voted—you can tell from reading my column! Then what’s the problem? Obviously I’m not hiding my viewpoint. Indeed, my position on every issue I write about is perfectly transparent. So why demand that I disclose my presidential vote? You seem to be saying it’s good for the soul. Hmm, that sounds familiar. “Just give them the names of the people you knew in the movement. It’s no big deal, they know them already.”

Ah, you say, but what about non-columnists? Shouldn’t we know this critical fact about them? Nonsense. You seem to think that everything about a reporter can be distilled down into this one act behind a voting booth curtain. You don’t even ask, how do we come by a political philosophy in the first place? Do we spring fully formed from our mother’s wombs as liberal or conservative? Is it hard-wired into our brains? Or is it the result of all sorts of factors, like where we grew up, how we were educated, who our friends were, our teachers, the things we’ve witnessed in our lives, etc.

You talk as though we’re all robots, and once we come by a political leaning we’re set for life. That’s like saying people never learn from their experiences, and never grow, and never change. And if that’s the case, why do you even do a blog? You’re not going to change anyone’s mind, right? So isn’t what you’re doing just intellectual masturbation?

Let me tell you a little about myself. I have two university degrees, I’ve worked all over the country, reported in Washington and on presidential campaigns, in the inner city, and the corporate world. I spent eight years living in Africa and Russia, covering famines, civil wars, AIDS, natural disasters, flying over bandit country in single-engine planes. I covered the tech bubble and the tech crash, wrote three books on three very different subjects. I read Garry Wills and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

And you think that if I reveal who I voted for for president you’ll know all you need to know?

Like all reporters, I cop to being human. I read, I experience, I learn, I look, and then I write what I see and understand about it to the best of my ability. And what I learn then goes into my store of knowledge and perspective, and influences how I look at the next thing. You got a problem with that? To say we are only who we voted for in the presidential election is to deny us our professionalism, which requires us to cast our information-gathering net as wide as possible, educate ourselves about an event or issue to the best of our ability, and then pass that education on to our readers.

How about I deny you your professionalism? Let’s see. Lawyers? They’re just money-grubbers. They’ll say anything they have to to make a buck or kiss the ass of Power. Channelling Hugh now: 98% of them are Republicans. Everybody knows that. They’re the most self-delusional people on Earth, because they think they’re upholding some sort of principle in the law, but they’re just keeping down the people and stuffing money in their pockets. Prosecutors? They just want to put all the black people in jail, they just won’t admit it. How come they refuse to disclose their racial background, huh? I mean, I can tell just by looking at them what race they are, so why won’t they just say so?

How’s that feel?

I responded, in a comment that has seemingly been lost to posterity. I won’t reproduce the entire response here. I did say that I would answer that last question by saying: “I’m white. So freaking what? I work with a lot of black prosecutors. None of us makes decisions based on race.” I observed that the “fetish” appears to be his and not mine. I made a few other comments, and praised him for doing the blog.

That was an interesting comment thread. But now it, and several other blog posts at Hiltzik’s blog, are gone.

I repeat that this could easily be a technical glitch. I hope it is. I’d hate to think the guy is being censored by his paper, or worse, is deep-sixing posts on his own.

I think a technical glitch is actually a reasonably likely explanation, given the fact that two fairly innocuous posts appear to have disappeared along with two more controversial ones. As I say, I have written Hiltzik to ask him what’s up. If and when he responds — and when I can get back to the computer — I’ll let you know. He is, of course, free to leave a comment of explanation here, as well.

P.S. If the thread in question goes back up, I’ll link my response to Hiltzik’s long comment above. [UPDATE: Here is my response.]

UPDATE: Hiltzik e-mails to say that the problem results from a Typepad glitch. He points to the Typepad status page, which confirms that Typepad blogs are showing content from a few days ago. He also tells me he fought to have comments on his blog. I am pleased to report both facts.

7 Responses to “Michael Hiltzik Deep-Sixes Blog Posts? Or Mere Technical Glitch? (UPDATED: It’s a Glitch)”

  1. What on earth gives him the idea that a majority of attorneys, let alone 98%, are Republicans?

    Angry Clam (fa7fff)

  2. I think that’s his point: we’re not.

    Patterico (806687)

  3. I get that, but usually hyperbole involves some element of the truth.

    Angry Clam (a7c6b1)

  4. I don’t think it was hyperbole. I think he was pretending to level at lawyers the same type of argument he believes Hugh levels at The Times: accusing a group of people of being almost uniformly of one political persuasion, when in fact they are diverse.

    I don’t buy it, but I think that’s where he’s going with it.

    Patterico (632a70)

  5. That makes more sense now that I’ve read the Hewitt transcript.

    Reading that made me want to gouge out my eyes, Oedipus-style.

    Angry Clam (fa7fff)

  6. You know, Kaus is right. Condescension isn’t the right attitude toward 50s and 60s fervent anti-communism. The right attitude is contempt.
    Gee, I wonder who he voted for…

    Polybius (938ca5)

  7. “accusing a group of people of being almost uniformly of one political persuasion, when in fact they are diverse”

    Brown eyes, blue eyes, bloodshot eyes – the Times welcomes them all.

    Same with military service – everyone’s welcome: once played with a gun in elementary school, saw “The Green Berets”, read a newspaper that frequently uses the word ‘military’ – the Times also welcomes them all.

    Sweetie (f6fb72)


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