Update on Blogging Anonymity and Blogging Ethics

I've been thinking a lot about anonymous blogging since E.D. Kain launched his campaign of workplace intimidation last year. For one thing, I no longer think anonymous blogging is automatically cowardly. Oh sure, mostly I'd prefer to have someone put their name behind their words. And of course at this point I still probably wouldn't have started blogging anonymously even today, given the knowledge that I have about the depths of evil on the web. No, it's more that I'm not going to be critical of those who do continue to blog anonymously.

Dan Riehl periodically goes off on Allahpundit for hiding behind a pseudonym, recently, for example, "Is Pseudonymous Blogging Pure High School?" Dan links to another essay that makes the case that blogging anonymously is juvenile: "Of Pet Rocks And Anonymous Bloggers, Specifically The Remarkable Similarities Between The Two." I think the main thing, as Dan points out, is whether the blogger in question is really a serious writer with critical things to say, and would rather speak freely and often harshly without fear of retribution, or whether you have bloggers whose sole existence online is to demonize and destroy those whom they hate. American Nihilist, for example, exists for the sole purpose of attacking me personally with the most demented bile imaginable, and that blog has gotten more perverted over time, eventually devolving into a Satanic hate outlet for workplace intimidation and non-stop vicious personal diatribes. It's a hate blog. It exists for no other purpose but to spew invective and evil. And I've repeatedly challenged the authors to put or up shut up by posting their full personal identification and contact information, but they have not done so. And that's cowardly.

And thinking about it, people like that --- Repsac3 and his hate-merchants of death, and all the others of similarly-warped criminal minds online --- are the types that Kyra Phillips is referring to in her attacks on bloggers in this CNN clip:

"There's going to have be a point in time where these people have to be held accountable ... How about all these bloggers that blog anonymously? They say rotten things about people and they're actually given credibility, which is crazy. They're a bunch of cowards, they're just people seeking attention."

The prompt for this, surprisingly, is the Shirley Sherrod story. Of course, Andrew Breitbart is anything but anonymous, so the real question CNN is weighing is accountability. And as the whole NAACP episode has shown, accountability has been provided by information dissemination. The more information that became available, the more we knew exactly what happened. Who won the "debate"? Each side is claiming victory, with leftists saying Breitbart's credibility has been destroyed while ABC's Terry Moran and conservatives across the 'sphere recognized the massive victory against the left's race-baiting industry.

No Sheeples Here! has a great discussion of the larger debate, "Fear The Blogosphere." And see also Serr8d's Cutting Edge, "A damned shame you have to go overseas to read media coverage that's not tainted with the biases of the American Left. We have no good new organizations left on this continent, it seems."

More at Memeorandum.

PREVIOUSLY: "Blogging Anonymity and Blogging Ethics."