We see the sad words today: the Northern Valley Beacon is shutting down. No really. This time they mean it. No foolin. No more second chances. They're history. Outta here.
I think a serious and thoughtful obituary of the most hysterical blog I have ever read is in order, but right now I'm still grading papers. This will have to do.
In its "Last Post" the NVB has this to say:
The Northern Valley Beacon web log became a target of a constant stream of witless scurrility. However, the blogs crossed the border from the scurrility well into the realm of fabrication. Handbooks on writing and rhetoric often liken plagiarism to robbery. It is portraying the work, thoughts, and words of others as one's own. A worse academic and journalistic crime is fabrication. It is making up information or altering information in a citation so that it appears to say something quite different from what it actually does say. It includes taking phrases from sentences out of their context and stringing them together to misrepresent the gist of quoted material and deliberately misstating what the subject is for a quoted passage. Fabrication is likened to fraud and murder because it gives a false portrayal of cited material usually for the purpose of attacking the mind and character of the authors of that material. Some blogs are so adept at fabrication that they make Joseph Goebbels look like the Flying Nun.
This is vintage Newquist style. One slander after another hurled with all the skill of a chimpanzee throwing feces at the folk on the other side of the bars. But to whom, precisely, are all these insults addressed? We are never told. You're supposed to know already. Character assassination by nod and wink. And of course, he never has to actually come clean on any of his accusations.
But I suppose that the above paragraph is more than a little directed at me. Observant readers of the Aberdeen American News will have noticed the correction printed in the lower left hand corner of page 4A, on Sunday, May 8. In one of my columns I quoted the NVB, but managed to get one word wrong. The quote in the NVB post refers to John Thune. I quoted it as an example of hate speech.
My version:
"His adds show him to be a thing-too debased to be called a man"
In their correction, the AAN not only showed the corrected passage, but the rest of the sentence as well.
"His adds show him to be a thing--he is too depraved to be called a man--possessed of the lowest, nastiest, and most malignant values."
So I erred by substituting debased for depraved, and by leaving out some of the defamatory language. This, I suppose, is what he means by "making up information or altering information in a citation." I can only plead on my behalf that my version made him look better rather than worse.
I am honestly sad that the NVB is going away. It's language was so extreme, its arguments so patently dishonest, that it was virtually impossible not to look good by comparison. One should have such enemies.
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