Thursday, March 01, 2001

Profiled writers hit back on the web

In the past week or so, we've seen David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times profile Dave Eggers, and Michael Wolff of New York magazine profile Andrew Sullivan. Both pieces were, rightly or wrongly, perceived as hatchet-jobs by their subjects, who both hit back by airing their grievances on their websites.

The Eggers/Kirkpatrick spat not only ran to more than 10,000 words on Eggers's site alone, but also prompted weighings-in from the likes of Slate, the New York Post, and, of course, the collected readership of Plastic. Naturally, the main clearing house for links such as these (as well as letters from Kirkpatrick, his friends and his enemies) is Jim Romenesko's Media News, which has a permanent link to andrewsullivan.com on its home page.

The knee-jerk reaction to all this is to say that it's a good thing, that the internet has democratised the media to the point where it's become much easier to find rebuttals and alternative views.

Yet virtually everybody involved has emerged from these skirmishes dimished. David Kirkpatrick comes across as a toadying hack who is more or less willing to email his entire article to its subject in advance; Dave Eggers shows himself to be a solipsistic thin-skinned whiner; Michael Wolff turns out to be the sort of person who would rather be tendentious than accurate; and Andrew Sullivan only confirms Wolff's thesis about his self-obsession. The New York Times, of course, is revealed once again to be staffed by human beings, rather than the empyrean creatures of its own lore.

Of course, we can't turn the clock back, and there is something incredibly compelling, in a car-crash sort of way, about watching Eggers air his own and David Kirkpatrick's dirty laundry in public. But once again the internet has proved itself best at the cheaply sensationalist, rather than the genuinely useful or informative. I'm sure that Dave Eggers would hate to be called the Matt Drudge of the New York Meejah Community, but in a way that's what he turned his website into: the place to go for off-the-record email exchanges and other such jetsam of the journalistic craft.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to point out that Dave Eggers has done a lot more damage to his own reputation with his petualant posting than David Kirkpatrick may or may not have inflicted with his piece on the paperback publication of Eggers' book. Certainly Eggers' complaints hugely increased the number of people who read the original piece. But Eggers isn't stupid. Could that have been his plan all along? Is this whole thing just a stunt to keep his name in the headlines? Sounds unlikely, but stranger things have happened over lunch at Michael's.

Posted by Felix at 2:06 EST