Last week I posted a piece called “Why I will never post another word at My.Firedoglake.com“. It was posted here at my own blog as well as at Angry Black Lady Chronicles and at Daily Kos. The next day I got a nastygram from the editor of the My.FDL site (a public site like Daily Kos where anyone can post diaries.) As I reported in my follow-up piece (“Liberal rule #1: Thou shall not cross Jane Hamsher“), they were none too happy and basically threatened me with FDL retribution.
The chances of you becoming a paid front pager somewhere have dropped significantly … Jane will never forget and she will bad mouth you to the major blog owners if your name comes up. She is a friend of Marcos [sic] and Josh Marshall and the guys who run the American Prospect and pretty much anyone on the liberal side of the blogs and you’ve made a major career fuck up.
After posting their comments here and at Angry Black Lady Chronicles, I waited to see what would happen. There were two options: (1) Their tyrannical boss would fire them for what they said about her or (2) they would keep their job suggesting that she was okay with them sending it, maybe even TOLD him to send it.
So far as I can tell, they still have their job. And, no, I wasn’t trying to get them fired, just let the interblogonetisphere know what they are doing to people they disagree with.
But that hasn’t stopped them from trying to fuck with me. Immediately following my piece, it became impossible to share links to Eclectablog.com on Facebook. If you try to do it, you get this message:
This message contains blocked content that has been previously flagged as abusive or spammy. Let us know if you think this an error.
Obviously it IS an error. Facebook blog fan pages are all about sharing links from your blog and thousands upon thousands of them do this every day. Clearly the firebaggers turned out en masse to mark my stuff as spam resulting in the current temporary condition (which is, of course, no big deal, just an annoyance.)
But they didn’t stop there. Knowing that I write for A2Politco.com, a paying gig that comprises a grand total of ~1% of my annual income (i.e., it’s not that lucrative), they contacted my editor there two days after my original piece, suggesting that she jettison me.
On another note, I got an anonymous email message suggesting that A2Politico drop you. I dunno if it’s related to your firelakedog dust up, but the timing is a bit creepy.
Needless to say, my editor and I had a good laugh at this. Their feeble attempt to flex their oh-so-fearsome interblogonetospheric muscle was something to be ridiculed, not taken seriously.
Since then, I’ve come to find out that this whole “You’ll never work in this internet again” schtick is not uncommon. Several prominent bloggers have told me that they, too, have received similar threats. One was documented pretty substantially at exiledonline.com:
Within minutes after this article was posted, Michael Whitney of Firedoglake sent Mike Elk, author of this article, the classic Hollywood death-knell: “You’ll never work in this town again.” Whitney, who once ran a labor blog for Firedoglake until it was taken down because it was so poorly put together and drew such anemic traffic, now serves as Vice President of the Membership Board for Firedoglake. Apparently one of his duties is acting as Hamsher’s hall monitor, policing the internet for anyone not sufficiently worshipful of his employer. Before working for Hamsher, Whitney worked for–ta-dum!– Hamsher’s ex-boyfriend at the SEIU.
As I said before, this is what we are dealing with when it comes to Jane Hamsher and her supporters. She stays above the fray and lets her lowlings do her dirty work. Meanwhile, she’s behind the scenes trying to keep the innernetz safe from the dumbest motherfuckers in the world and the bloggers who blog about them.
Liberal? Hardly. Ethical? HAH! Scummy, lame and pathetic? DING! DING! DING! We have a winner!!!
There’s freedom in being an unpaid blogger: you don’t have to kiss anyone’s ass to do what you do. You can write about what you wish, who you wish, how you wish. If the firebaggers think I’m sitting by the phone waiting for Markos to call me and offer me a front-pager writing job at Daily Kos, they are quite delusional. That would be terrific, of course, but neither I nor the hundreds of other active diarists there are holding our breath waiting for that anointment. We’re happy to have an outlet where lots of people can see our work. We provide free content in exchange for a wider audience, just like I do at a variety of locations, including Daily Kos.
Have you been threatened by Queen Hamsher and her court of syncophantic jesters? Drop me a line. Let’s get this stuff out there. The more people understand about the kind of people that run the show there, the sooner we can scrape them off the bottom of our shoe and move on to facing our real enemies, the Republicans and their tea party wannabes.
