Blog Bust-up
by Bob Cook

In the Nov. 5, 2001, Wall Street Journal, journalist Gregg Easterbrook wrote a piece defending the American public's First Amendment right to react harshly to anyone who seemed to take political pleasure in the Sept. 11 attacks. "[The] right to expression — clearly political and protected — is absolute. But there exists no right to exemption from the reaction to what is said."

Doesn't Easterbrook know that now.

Thanks to an Oct. 13 entry on his blog that placed the words "Jewish executive," "Hollywood" and "worship of money" in uncomfortably close proximity, bloggers have called Easterbrook an anti-Semite and a bigoted ass, resulting in an apology posted on the blog. Easterbrook's words became the subject of a New York Times article. And he lost his job.

But Easterbrook didn't lose his job as senior editor at the New Republic, which hosts the blog. The magazine merely disowned his comments. Instead, he lost his job writing the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN.com. He didn't just lose his job — he got disappeared. His archives were gone as of Saturday, when Easterbrook said he was told he was fired. "Gregg Easterbrook, who has been a freelance contributor to ESPN.com and not an employee, recently published comments elsewhere that were highly offensive and intolerable. He will no longer be asked to contribute to our web site," was the official and only word in a statement from ESPN.

The firing shocked many of Easterbrook's fellow bloggers, who were among the first to rip him for his entry. Maybe Easterbrook got in trouble because one of the movie executives whose Jewishness he invoked during his harangue about Kill Bill and Hollywood violence was Michael Eisner of Disney — which owns ESPN. Maybe he got in trouble because of all the grief ESPN took for not firing Rush Limbaugh right after he announced on the network's NFL pregame show that the media overrated quarterback Donovan McNabb because it was "desirous" of a black quarterback to do well.

But Easterbrook's firing also speaks to a new reality for bloggers: Whether you have a blog on a mainstream media site, as Easterbrook did, or an independent site — your words can and will be used against you by your employer or anyone you may do business with.

In blogging, "there's a certain bare-knuckle attitude inherited from its precursors — forum threads, Usenet, flame wars," said blogger Meryl Yourish of Richmond, Va, in a phone interview. "This whole incident is making me rethink this."

Yourish, whose site tracks anti-Semitism, claims responsibility for what she called the "snowball on the mountain effect." She wrote the first blog entry trashing Easterbrook to get wide circulation, courtesy of being linked on Instapundit. Yourish, after writing she was a fan of the football column, virtually rubbed her eyes in disbelief at Easterbrook's blog entry, providing the following classic line: "WTF? WTF? WTeffingF?" Easterbrook has written extensively on theology, but up to that point, no one had seen him write like a believer in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

There has long been a debate among bloggers about writers' accountability. But it mainly focused on whether editing — and Easterbrook's blog was not edited — would inhibit blogs' spontaneity. An example of that debate came in September, when the Sacramento Bee put an editor on Daniel Weintraub's blog after staffers complained about an item saying if California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante weren't Hispanic, he'd never have ascended to the position of Assembly Speaker back in his legislative days.

The debate had not spilled much into whether a blog could get you fired — from journalism or other professions — until Denis Horgan lost his column in a shakeup at the Hartford Courant. He then created his own blog to continue writing, though he was still employed at the Courant as travel editor. The Courant ordered it down April 17, two weeks after it went up. "I didn't see any harm in an unsupervised parallel universe" separate from the paper, Horgan said in a phone interview. "But I did see harm in being unemployed."

But after thousands of dollars in legal bills for Horgan while fighting for his blog, the Courant agreed to give him a blog on the company site. It premiered Oct. 19, and is edited by the paper's editor-in-chief.

Yourish said she's known of bloggers who have lost their jobs or been threatened with firing over their blogs. But she said she never thought her blog would result in somebody getting fired.

Yourish's site ordinarily gets about 1,500 visitors a day, although she said that bumped up to 6,000 after the Instapundit link. Yourish was hardly alone in going after Easterbrook — Roger L. Simon, a popular Hollywood blogger, screenwriter and novelist, also was a center of buzzing over Easterbrook's ghastly prose. Easterbrook e-mailed both Yourish and Simon to hear him out, which they did. Yourish said she feels assured he made an extremely unfortunate slip and is not an anti-Semite, and agrees with Easterbrook that ESPN overreacted in firing him.

Easterbrook wouldn't comment about any action he might take against ESPN as a result of his firing. "The fact that the world is becoming more sensitive about words, and big corporations are more sensitive about this, that's a good thing," Easterbrook said in a phone interview from his New Republic office in Washington. "That doesn't mean we should become vindictive.

"Blogs are an emerging form, and like any emerging form, it has birth pangs. This is obviously going to go down as one of the big birth pangs of the blog."

Easterbrook has the support of his bosses at the New Republic, although managing editor Peter Scoblic said in a phone interview that Easterbrook's blog from here on out will have some sort of "vetting."

"I don't think anybody who attacked Easterbrook wanted to see him fired. I certainly didn’t," Simon wrote in his blog after his conversation with Easterbrook. "To the degree that I am even remotely responsible for this I humbly apologize. I can only say this is another example of what we all know — words have consequences."

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.

Disclosure: Flak opinion section editor Clay Risen, a New Republic employee, recused himself from the editing and conception of this article.