Garrigan
How many bloggers actually have jobs? We don’t know, except to say one fewer now than before.
That’s because a poor blogging sap who’d made his bed—only to be snugly tucked in by the Scene—lost his job at Belmont University last week. Maybe he deserved it. Maybe he didn’t. But the Scene makes no apologies for exposing the juvenile, anti-Muslim Internet speech of Bill Hobbs, a “blog-based journalist” who has worked feverishly over the last few years to be regarded seriously, and whose political blog at one time saw serious Internet traffic (Political Notes, April 13).
Beyond the sober reality of job loss, in which only the most heartless and anonymous blog-world gadflies take glee, last week’s exposure and subsequent hand-wringing over Hobbs’ tacky handiwork were colored and complicated by a host of entanglements. With each blog post and newspaper story, and as this or that character jumped into the fray, the issue became only more convoluted and nuanced and, not least, comically absurd. (Equally absurd, by the way, was the disproportionate obsession with this issue within the Nashville blogosphere, which is becoming more and more irrational by the day. A pie chart detailing their collective late-night posts might show that something like 2 percent were about the Iraq war, 1 percent about Washington corruption, 1 percent about recent Midstate tornado devastation, 1 percent about the Metro dog park pit bull ban and 93 percent about Bill Hobbs.)
Anyway, almost no one involved in reporting about the issue, or simply weighing in, was without some bias against one or another of the other characters in the mix, not that it would have changed anything in the end—or in the beginning, for that matter. But because we at the Scene regard ourselves as truth seekers and truth tellers, we offer, in no particular order, a short batty-but-true litany of small-town truths, confessions and conflicts—including our own—that made the whole affair both incredibly screwy and all the more interesting.
• No daily newspaper reporter or editor would concede the following, given the laughable myth of objectivity that would have readers suspend their critical faculties, but Bill Hobbs is, to say the least, a, um, challenging personality. That is to say, a classic, difficult know-it-all without the charm to mitigate all that blowhard wisdom. Now, the Scene didn’t write about his controversial Mohammed cartoon because of that, but if you asked a journalism professor whether our point of view about Hobbs’ social skills constituted a conflict, he or she might well say yes. Also, if memory serves, he used to sell Amway products. Something about pyramid schemes raises a red flag.
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• John Spragens, the Scene scribe who penned last week’s Political Notes column about the Hobbs cartoon, (sort of) goes back a ways with Hobbs, it turns out. Back when Spragens was in high school at Hume-Fogg, he was quoted in The Tennesean about a local student rally supporting more education funding. Hobbs used the blogosphere to pick on the kid: “Umm...John, we ARE funding the school system to the tune of $400 million a year—about 40 PERCENT of the city’s entire budget…. I thought Hume Fogg was for smart kids.” That was in 2000, at which time Scene writer Matt Pulle—who would later comment on the situation at hand, calling Spragens’ work “authoritatively reported, sharp, irrefutable” and saying “Belmont has every right to let go of someone who acts like an idiot in public”—took Hobbs to task for picking on a high schooler.
• Also, Spragens is a short-timer here, having given notice that he’s going to work for (very conservative) Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper in May (a fact that’s been previously disclosed in these pages). Feverish bloggers have noted breathlessly that Democratic political operative Mike Kopp was the first critic to take on Hobbs and his cartoon, and now the black choppers are really creating a dust storm. Is Spragens a true believer who’s been taken in by party loyalists? Was he co-opted to make a conservative look bad? Uh, no and no. Stupidity knows no ideology, and we’re all about equal opportunity here, which Spragens skillfully practices. Also, a conservative, Roger Abramson, wrote the Scene’s political column until recently, and he’s welcome to come back any time.
• Speaking of Abramson, who wrote a passionate objection to the Scene’s column on his blog (www.flanktwoposition.com), labeling it “a singularly nasty piece of writing,” he was interviewed by Tennessean freelancer Travis Loller, who wrote a flat, just-the-facts-ma’am Saturday piece about the whole flap. They went to high school together 17 years ago. Abramson’s quote never made the story, though.
• And speaking of Travis Loller, she had applied for a staff writer job at the Scene before any of this madness ensued. (Her clips remain on the desk from which this is written.) After being assigned the story Friday and calling the Scene for comment, she disclosed her “ethical dilemma” to her editor, Jennifer Peebles, whose remedy was to keep Loller on the story without interviewing the Scene editor (who used to work at The Tennessean) about the matter.
Who says Nashville’s not a small town?