The anonymous editor of the Bionic Mosquito has crossed the line. I will never trust him again.
He made up a story about his community. In my summary of it, I said it sounded amazing. I had never read anything like it before. Well, there was a reason for that: the article was a hoax.
I suppose he thought he was clever. He is not clever. He is a willful deceiver. He betrayed his readers without qualms. He also betrayed the people who gave him publicity and helped him build his site.
Now he finds that his hoax has multiplied. This seems to come as a surprise to him. It shouldn't. He was trusted.
He had not developed a reputation as a satirist or humorist. He was not perceived as P.J. O'Rourke or Mark Steyn. Then, out of the blue, he tried to be clever. This attempt has blown up in his face. That is exactly where it should have blown up.
Here's how it works. When you gain your reputation for telling the truth, and you willfully deceive your readers, for whatever reason, the wise ones will never trust you again. They may use you for background material, but nobody will ever quote you again as a reliable source. That is because you are not a reliable source. You believed that cleverness trumps the truth. It doesn't. Not in the field of journalism, it doesn't.
Now he writes the following:
This Has Gotten Out of HandI am referring to my post, Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire.
When I wrote the post, I debated introducing it with a disclaimer; I decided not to do so, and this has caused some misunderstandings.
Here is the disclaimer: the post is fiction; I do not live in such a place; I don’t know of such a place; if I knew of such a place I would move there…if they would have me.
Only because he had hidden behind his anonymous postings for years could he have pulled off such a hoax. People who knew who he was would have known it was a hoax. But they didn't know. His anonymous status enabled him to pull off this stunt. Readers, who naïvely trusted this man, did not know it was a hoax. They did not understand that this man has no concept of journalistic integrity. They did not understand that he has no commitment to the truth. He just wants to be clever.
When you successfully deceive someone who trusts you, it is not a sign of your cleverness. It is a sign of your total lack of integrity.
He adds this:
I will say again, to all who misunderstood the purpose of the subject post, I apologize for creating a misunderstanding. The fault is mine.In the future, if I ever write fiction again (this may be only the second or third time that I can recall), I will label it as such.
Too late. It's over.
This man built up the reputation of his site, and he threw it away in one preposterous hoax. He showed all the world that he does not have common sense.
About 35 years ago, I was discussing conservative journalism with the man who had been the managing editor of American Opinion, Scott Stanley. In fact, he was the editor. Robert Welch was the titular editor, but Welch did not edit the magazine.
Stanley told me this story. One of the writers he occasionally used had written a couple of marginally successful books. One of them, which was an exaggeration, was widely quoted by conservatives who did not understand the subject. The other book was reputable, scholarly, and was never quoted by anybody.
The man mailed an article that Stanley considered running. But some of the documentation did not hold up. Stanley got suspicious. He called the man to find out what had gone wrong. The author admitted to him that he had faked the evidence because the issue was so important. He decided that it would be good to launch an attack on the particular leftist involved. Stanley told him that he would never publish anything the man wrote again. Stanley was exactly right.
There is zero tolerance for this sort of thing, and there should be. There is no way to rebound from a stunt like this. Subscribers may go along with it if it's not a paid website. I think that no professional journalist should ever trust the site again.
This man has weak ethics, poor judgment, and no sense. I don't know who he is, but if I were that man, I would never tell anybody that the website is mine. I would feign ignorance.
The man sucked me in. I responded. He will not suck me in again.
Lew Rockwell may be kind and forgiving. Maybe he will still post this man's articles. I guarantee you, I never will.
Leonard Read had two statements that I always appreciated. The first one was this: "When you write something satirical, a lot of your readers will take it seriously. You should never write satire." Had I not started my journalistic career as an anonymous satirist, I might never use satire. My readers can tell when I am using exaggeration . . . I hope. But I never used satire when I wrote for Read's publication, The Freeman.
The other one he used regarding someone who had sucked him in, got caught, and who would never suck him in again. "He is in the past tense."
For me, the Bionic Mosquito is in the past tense.
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