Time for another blogger ethics panel

Good God, I've always wanted to borrow that joke. Thank heaven for Sal Perricone (AKA "Henry L Mencken1951)

NEW ORLEANS – An assistant U.S. Attorney is in fact the commenter on the NOLA.com web site who penned comments under the pen name "Henry L. Mencken1951," according to U.S. Attorney Jim Letten.

Letten said that assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone admitted on Tuesday that he made the nearly 600 postings under that name.

Perricone's postings as Henry L. Mencken1951 included criticisms of judges and of Letten himself and there were some concerning the River Birch probe.

River Birch co-owner Fred Heebe claimed in a court petition that the comments made by “Henry L. Mencken1951” were actually made by Perricone.

To begin with, it's disconcerting to see professional media persons who the public supposes to be sophisticated about such things, badly botch their internet taxonomy by labeling Perricone a "blogger" in their reporting. Do they not fact check these terms? I'm told Wikipedia is a popular TV journalist's research tool. Let's see what we find there.

A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log)[1] is a personal journal published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often are themed on a single subject. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users. (Previously a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.)

Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.

Perricone didn't operate a blog which is essentially an online diary of what the author considers to be pertinent events and/or recommended reading, preferably with an open comments section for reader feedback. Perricone, instead, was a frequent commenter under articles which appeared on a newspaper website. Those are both means of sharing information on the internet but there are technical differences in terminology which one may expect one's grandmother.. or possibly Garland Robinette.. to accidentally conflate now and again but when professional news persons do it, one figures they should know better and wonders if they aren't doing it on purpose.

Why is this important? Well aside from the professional journalistic imperative to get facts correct, misuse of terms in this manner serves to indict by association the entire practice of blogging, social networking, or using the internet for anything beyond mere consumption purposes as a somehow malevolent activity. Lumping all independent use of social media into the same category as newspaper commenters is reductive and deceptive.

This last became a serious issue in New Orleans when Mayor Ray Nagin, who is currently facing federal prosecution thanks in large part to the investigative work of local bloggers Karen Gadbois and Jason Berry, began referring to the frequently racist bile found in the NOLA.com comments as "blogs" in order to attack his critics through this false association.

It's unfair and inaccurate for our press persons to further this misconception. What if, for the sake of argument, I were to suggest that based on what we know of Garland Robinette's acceptance of a bribe from his friend Fred Heebe, that we should be suspicious of anything we read from Garland's friend Clancy Dubos on the subject? Or what about Times-Picayune city editor Gordon Russell whose name turned up on Heebe's "lobbyist" list and who last week treated us to 10,000 words of gossipy gawking at Perricone's online "Mencken" persona? Are Clancy and Gordon also covering for Heebe? It's horribly unfair for us to even suggest that but perhaps only slightly less so than it is to say that commenting on NOLA.com is equal to "blogging."


It's unfortunate that we're spending so much time on this sideshow about what John Georges once termed the "dangerous people" of the internet because it obscures the actual newsworthy item which is this. A federal prosecutor has jeopardized a case against an entrenched snake of a corrupt landfill owner through a blatant breech of professional ethics. Perricone publicly disclosed inside information relating to an open case he was working on. Clancy, being a law-talking guy himself, seems to have a handle on this although he buries the point under some semi-sanctimony about anonymity as it relates to "guts" and "integrity" and so forth.

Besides, it’s one thing to dismiss my musings as “effluvia.” It’s something else altogether for a federal prosecutor to launch venomous online broadsides at targets of federal investigations.

Attorneys have a legal duty to refrain from making “extrajudicial comments” about ongoing cases. Prosecutors have an added duty not to make comments “that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.” Perricone did both with alacrity.

If Perricone had been discussing this sensitive information publicly in a rant at a corner bar, or in a letter to the editor, or on the air with Garland, or even if he had started an actual blog about it, it would be a serious and shockingly stupid ethical misstep. There's nothing magical about the internet that alters or exacerbates Perricone's offense. The whole world should be saying, "well yeah, duh, what a douche this guy is," but instead we're all looking to call the latest "Blogger Ethics Panel" to order.

Worse, the dedication of so much ink and pixel to "ooh scary blogger" pearl clutching has prevented anyone from asking some relevant questions. Well, almost anyone. Berry, in fact, jumps right to it here opening up the speculation as to just how Heebe was tipped off to Perricone's identity. *

Heebe claims to have outed Perricone through the use of a "forensic linguist" he hired.

The suit says the analysis was conducted by James Fitzgerald, whose work for the FBI "proved instrumental" in the arrest and successful prosecution of Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber, after a 17-year investigation that included analysis of the mail bomber's 35,000-word manifesto.

What's missing from the Times-Picayune report on Heebe's lawsuit, though, is the fact that Kaczynski was actually turned in by his own family. I'm sure this forensic syntax palm reading phrenologist dude has made quite a post-retirement business for himself glomming on to cases like this, but I'd be astonished if Heebe didn't hire the guy only after having been tipped off by someone.

If the tipster is someone inside US Attorney Jim Letten's office, that's already a pretty bad sign. Remember Heebe has plenty of contacts at the Department of Justice and was, himself, once suggested as a candidate for Letten's post... domestic abuse, though, is kind of frowned on there.

It's also possible that identifying information on Perricone such as his IP address might have been shared with Heebe by the good people at NOLA.com or their clients at the T-P As we've already established, Heebe has "lobbyists" everywhere. Dambala points out this, at the very least, would constitute a violation of NOLA.com's own user agreement and possibly Perricone's own privacy and free speech rights.

Don't misunderstand me, Perricone is clearly in the wrong here. But the specific details of just what his wrongs are matter. As if to illustrate my point once again, here's the T-P's Laura Maggi's lede to a story that just popped up while I was typing this.

The Department of Justice office that will have to determine whether prosecutor Sal Perricone violated internal federal rules or state ethics mandates when he left snarky anonymous postings on online news stories has received more than 1,000 complaints annually in recent years about potential misconduct by Justice employees.

Perricone's alleged ethics violation relates specifically to his responsibilities in his role as a federal prosecutor. They have nothing to do with "snark" or anonymity or whether or not we can call him a "blogger." But for some reason, our reporters insist on shoe-horning all of that into the story. Why is that?

Speaking personally as someone who married into the actual H.L. Mencken's extended family, I am flabbergasted by the proposition that professional newspaperers seem to have lost their taste for snark. At least our friends at NOLA Defender had the presence of mind to seek out the man's own words for insight here.

As for our local tee-vee folk, I wonder if they even know who Mencken was. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to learn they were still wondering if he was available for comment.


* In fairness to Clancy Dubos, his post also calls for an investigation into the question of whether or not Perricone acted alone.