How NOT To Handle Being Attacked By Gawker: Steve Almond

It's Gawker week on The Editorialiste, folks. I can just feel it.

I just read a terrifying post on The Huffington Post by erstwhile author Steve Almond about how Gawker is somewhere along the lines of Sen. Joe McCarthy, Bill O'Reilly and Star magazine.

Star magazine, OK. But two of those three things, I feel, are amiss on that list.

In his post, Almond describes having no prior experience with the site until he got a heads-up that he's been the subject of a few posts. Evidently, this steamed him -- so much so that he quickly read the somewhat-maligned Grigoriadis-penned article that my dear guest columnist Mitchel Stevens referenced in his last post...and, now with a complete background in all-things Gawker, he wrote this scathing piece in HuffPo.

"They don't pretend to care about 'objectivity' or even accuracy for that matter," he writes, offering up a YouTube video of editor Emily Gould saying the same thing verbatim as proof. But then he reaches too far:

"Gawker readers remind me of all those aggrieved citizens who continue to fall for the GOP's hate campaigns -- and to vote against their own economic interests."

Now I'm no huge Gawker-waving fan, but these things are so far off-base that it made me cringe...and comment on his post. I couldn't stand reading something by someone who got steamed from getting attacked on Gawker and then strikes back without understanding what he's attacking.

Turns out the "pomposity" line in Gawker's post was prophetic.

To Almond's defense, he does get a few things right on the money: That "the payoff for Gawker bloggers is that they gain enough notoriety to land jobs within the media empires they claim to despise" and that the site is "an entirely amoral zone." But what he fails to do is raise any points about Gawker that haven't already been raised in every article ever written about the site ever.

Oh yeah -- and somehow, he equates it with the right-wing, and takes the high ground by signing off with the advice that we should be concentrating more on national issues than media-socialite-blather.

On this argument, I'm in Emily Gould's court. She's been forced to carry far too much responsibility for the misunderstanding (Gawker = McCarthy? Seriously?) of occasional readers. To me, it seems like the only person who's fear-mongering is Almond himself.