Not Making Fans

Eric Kluster: It was a time consideration, Mike...
Mike Wallace: Time? Bullshit! You corporate lackey! Who told you your incompetent little fingers had the requisite skills to edit me?

--The Insider (1999)

Exeter: Now place your hands above the rail
[hands suddenly attach to the rail]
Exeter: ... they're magnetized.
Crow T. Robot: And if your hands were metal, that would mean something.

--Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996)

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The Baltimore Sun has several blogs in its online edition. I contribute comments to a few of them, including InsideEd (the new name for Classroom Connections), and Reality Check (about Reality TV programs). I also lurk on You Don't Say, which is about word usage.

I've also spent some time with Random Rodricks, which is the blog run by Dan Rodricks (surprise!). Rodricks' blog is a smattering of things that didn't quite make his column, or which may supplement his column in the dead tree edition.

Back on August 22, Rodricks did a short post about that infamous Orioles game, the one which they lost 30-3.  A day or two later I submitted a comment which quoted a joke that David Letterman had used the next night. Now, comments on the Sun's website are moderated, so it doesn't post until it's been OK'd by someone. A short while later I got an email back from Rodricks saying that he hadn't seen the Letterman show in question and thanking me for my submission. However, my comment didn't appear.

On the 27th, Rodricks posted:

Missed this last week -- David Letterman on the Orioles' 30-3 drubbing by the Rangers.

"The Orioles were actually ahead 3-to-nothing earlier in the game. Then they made the mistake of putting up a 'Mission Accomplished' banner."

Basically, he didn't credit me for giving him the quotation. I shrugged it off and moved on.

This past Sunday, his column ended with the following:

Don Imus will be going back to morning radio -- and I'll be going back to not listening.

This would be meaningful if Don Imus had a Baltimore outlet prior to his getting canned. Saying something like this is kind of like my promising never to watch another new episode of Weeds. I don't get Showtime, so it's not a tough promise to keep, get it? So I went to his blog and commented on his most recent item, then made my observation about his not listening to Imus.

A while later I got an email from Rodricks. The first paragraph was what I'd written in my comment:

Today's (Sunday) column mentioned that Don Imus is returning to radio and
you're going to continue not listening to him. That's not so tough,
considering that he hasn't had a radio outlet in Baltimore for a long time
prior to his dismissal...

Rodricks reply:

"Well, duh . . . ."

In addition, he'd excised the above passage from the comment before posting it. I'm not sure what I'm more irritated about, the fact that he'd lopped off my comment, or his rather condescending email response. But this, on top of his prior failure to credit me, is of some concern in my head. I'm still not quite clear on what irritates me about all this in the aggregate, but I'll say this: None of my comments to other Sun blogs are tampered with like this, and I'm going to have to think hard before submitting to this particular one again.

Comments

[JJT]

I recall a similar item when I sent an email to Rodricks concerning something he had written about in his column some short time ago. If memory serves, I was correcting him on an error in his column. Needless to say, there was nary a reply nor a correction posted.

I compare this interaction to the one I had with David Zurawick, who kindly replied, apologized for his error, and had a nice reply to a small joke I made in my email to him.

As far as I am concerned, Rodricks is a bleeding-heart liberal who has a penchant for thinking he is "holier than thou" while at the same time presenting this image of the common citizen. For all extents and purposes, pardon my terminology, he is an arrogant asshole who has let his personal crusade of seeking employment for former criminals go to his head.

And in the slim chance Rodricks reads this and replies, I'll gladly take him on in a war of words.