It's good to see another adult perspective on the recent Daily Caller debacle. There have been plenty of them. However, too many on the Right got trapped into seeing this through a political, or even a Palin perspective. The Palin fixation set-in on both sides. I never saw the story as damaging to Palin, so much as it did damage the Caller, while denigrating women in general. Call me old fashioned, or traditional; it was the latter that infuriated me. Also, while no prude, I could also see Tyson was talking about violence, not sex - not even kinky sex in his mind. This is clearly one very troubled dude in his views on women.
That he remains half an icon, assuming he even does, speaks volumes on the deterioration of values and culture in today's America. Seeing a Right and even some friends on a Right that's supposed to objectively stand for certain things defend it, or think it was funny, also disgusted me. And that goes for some newer so called, or self-appointed, prominent voices on the Right, as well.
I haven’t posted about the Twitter and blog war which broke out over a clip of Mike Tyson trash talking Sarah Palin in very explicit and violent sexual ways, although I did spotlight Dan Riehl’s post about it as Post of the Day.
The controversy is not that a convicted rapist would make such statements, but that The Daily Caller would run the clip with a bold traffic-grabbing headline and keep it there without so much as any commentary (which was not added until later).
In terms of my involvement, let's get the facts and time-line very straight. I first merely denounced it, saying it should be taken down. Based only on that, this idiot Jeff Poor attacked me. He didn't offer a reasonable counter-argument. The young idiot took to Twitter to accuse me of payola, based upon an old Caller story that demonstrated no such thing. Okay, upstart, I reasoned, you want to see how to really play that game? - hence the Is Jeff Poor A Pedophile? post I've since taken down out of courtesy and practicality.
It was done in a specific manner so as to not be actionable. I was only trying to teach an all too full of himself rookie a lesson. Carlson's call to me proved he was not much better. You don't call people up yelling and threatening when you want something and don't have a legal leg to stand on in getting it. Carlson either was too dumb to understand the issues clearly, or too full of himself, while perhaps assuming I would be scared, or impressed somehow and panic because Tucker Carlson himself called me. Yeah, that worked out real well for him.
When I took the post down, I did it to deprive them a talking point that had already worked for me, not out of fear of legal action. Several idiots at DC even Tweeted and Re-Tweeted the link themselves. I was screencapping all of them and laughing at the stupidity inherent in it. Any decent lawyer would tell them how dumb they would look to try and sue me at that point. Duh!
As for the story, the Caller could have reported every detail of it as far as I'm concerned, had they only done it professionally. They never called ESPN for comment. That's what journalists do. The smart play for them would be to have done that, gone after ESPN, been a hero on the Right and still gained the traffic benefits. I'm assuming they couldn't even get out of their own way to run with a dumb bit of traffic whoring. They played the entire thing like rank amateurs, even doubling down on attacking me.
There are plenty of people I respect and would seriously worry about their coming after me out here, none of those particular guys qualify as one of them. All I wanted to do was keep my head down and keep punching to keep the story alive until reinforcements with far more power and influence arrived. Thank you, DC'r, for playing along. I'm out of it, now and glad to be done with it. My last involvement was when Carlson's partner called me with a reasonable request I was glad to act on promptly. He was honest, direct and polite because one doesn't need to be anything else - to deal with me, or otherwise, in business. He's probably also the one guy out of the whole crew over there I most likely wouldn't want to piss off btw. Heh! Contrary to the opinions of some people, I try never to over-estimate myself! Some of the good folks from the Caller might be able to learn something from that.
Blog fights aside, they have damaged their brand, as Prof. Jacobson points out. You can be TMZ or a Beltway pub, but you can't be both. And when you're caught so obviously misleading people, not taking any responsibility for bad judgment and otherwise dissembling, you tend to damage, and make a fool of, yourself. That is precisely what the DC just did, no matter how some like-minded people, and their friends and employees might like to make it appear otherwise. It's unfortunate, because it never had to happen that way in the first place. They missed several early opportunities to do both a right and smart thing, whatever path they chose, other than the one path they did, imo.
