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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 4/25/2007 2:30:46 PM
Title: Not put to rest quite yet
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From CHRIS LEHMAN: I am writing in response to Eric Alterman's droll 8-point clarification of the conversation he had with my wife about her role at Time, and his quite personal attacks on her writing as a means of pretending to decry a conservative bias at the news weekly. (Normally I let Ana fight her own battles, but she's off in New Hampshire -- I hope you're sitting down Eric -- reporting a political story for Time.)

To begin with, Alterman's strenuous letter is a far cry from "finally putting this thing to bed." Indeed, if I can borrow a bit of his own dudgeon about "misreporting" I would note his opening clause contains an obvious error: This now-notorious exchange was not "a cocktail party conversation" but occurred at a brunch at the Hay-Adams hotel.

I know that's an irritating nit to pick, but since Alterman is posing here as a heroic victim of "unedited" web scribes and flagrant "mis-reporting," I'd gently suggest he pay a bit more attention to his surroundings.

And speaking of surroundings, why don't we have a look at the drive-by charcterization of Ana that touched off all this in the first place? Here is Alterman in his June 12, 2006 Nation column, Time is on _Their_ Side:

Recently, Time added to its stable Caitlin Flanagan, who debuted with an unsourced attack on Democrats for family hating. They [sic] also added Ana Marie Cox, a putative liberal whose specialty on her blog, Wonkette, were posts about--sorry, Mom--"ass-fucking," as if to prove the conservatives' point about liberal perversity. (Were Kinsley, Garry Wills, Molly Ivins, E.J. Dionne, Bill Moyers, Josh Marshall, Arianna Huffington, etc. all unavailable?)

Lay aside the sneering, ill-informed "putative liberal" crack--but do note he is talking about a former editor for Mother Jones and the American Prospect. (Or is Alterman's tacit point that anyone to the right of, say, Monthly Review or the Sparticist Daily Worker only a "putative liberal"?) Consider the well-worn plaint that my coarse, perverse spouse somehow "specialized" in producing an unending stream of blogposts about "ass-fucking." In reality, Wonkette--always more of a satire outlet than a "gossip" site on her watch in the first place--first employed the "ass-fucking" phrasing to ridicule the Bush administration's proposed consitutional ban on gay marriage. The idea at the time was to call out the thing that the administration actually wanted to outlaw by its true name--"the federal no-ass-fucking amendment." So I would again suggest to empirically minded readers that when Alterman makes a show of apologizing to his Mom, he is either showing an altogether deficient grasp of satire in English, or indulging in a lazy bid to dismiss three years worth of blogging on all manner of issues, from Falluja to Hurricane Katrina as one long gay-porn clip reel. He is, in other words, gleefully taking up the same blunt cudgel that conservative writers have been applying to Ana ever since her online career took off in earnest (or, as is my larger point here, not-so-earnest). So forgive me, marital rooting interests aside, for failing to follow the reasoning that this one fateful phrase is somehow a grievous betrayal of the liberal faith--and to wonder a bit at how comfortable a putative liberal pundit feels in casually reducing a female writer's career to a description of a sexual practice./CONTINUED

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