No Replacement For Displacement

Weblog Central, meet Brendon O'Neill

Remember when I mentioned about getting hits by making a phony shitstorm?
Well that's what MSNBC did when it accused Little Green Footballs of being racist They knew that LGF was a wildly popular destination, linked to from many pages. It is fair to assume that the editor for MSNBC's site knew the strong anti-Islamofascist content of LGF. It is also fair to assume that the editor put up the site last week anyway, obviously believing that there was nothing wrong with that content.

Now fast forward to yesterday. The editor gets some hate mail about LGF, from the usual suspects. Now, instead of saying that LGF is a racist site, and removing it because he put up that blog in error, he simply relates the accusations put forth by the usual suspects, using the sort of "some say" editorializing that one finds on the front page of the Howell Raines Gazette.

However, and this is most important, he does not remove the site. If he really thought it was racist, he would have removed the site, with a note of apology. He didn't do that. What he did was toss out the accusation, leaving the link in place. When Charles saw the link, understandably, he got angry and asked people to email the editor and disabuse him of the whole "racist" claim. Then the Great Glenn linked. And Meryl Yourish. And Misha. And Bill Herbert. And Tony Pierce. And a whole bunch of others as well.

I won't begrudge any of these bloggers for mentioning the abysmal treatment Charles has gotten at the hands of MSNBC. He was slandered, the accusations are baseless, and someone's good name was trashed. However, if one looks at it as a means to generate hits and emails, well, it appears that MSNBC has succeeded, using Charles' reputation as the fuel. I sent an email long before I wrote this post. Looking back on it, I wish I hadn't. All I did was fuel the appetite for MSNBC to create another phony shitstorm later, using some other poor blogger as the means to do so. Pretty slimy on their part.

Update: First paragraph was a bit awkward. I edited it for clarity.