A recent item on TAPPED about television news observes:

We are fortunate to live in a nation and era with unprecedented wealth. What better way to use that wealth than to keep more of your own time?

Speaking of gainful employment, one of my favorite blogs has come to an end due to a new policy of his employer. Doug, editor of the Sciolist, has a day job working for his local newspaper. Earlier this week, that newspaper announced a new policy. You can read the whole text in the Sciolist's final post, but the gist of it is that employees are forbidden to have their own public websites in which they discuss any topic which might they might be expected to edit or write about for the newspaper. Since Doug's position is at the news desk, that pretty much rules out any sort of current events on his blog. Unlike me, Doug is a normal person who values keeping his job, so he put up the one last post to say goodbye, and that's the end of the Sciolist.

Wow. I have several thoughts on this, though they don't come together into a cogent argument.

Making rules restricting the use of the company's computers, or how employees spend their time while at work -- that makes perfect sense to me. Telling them what they can and can't do on their own time seems to me to cross a line.

On the other hand, I don't really dispute that an employer ought to have the right to make such a specification. If an employer wants to refuse to employ any person who, say, wears socks in bed, then he should be free to have a company policy saying that wearing socks in bed is grounds for dismissal. Of course I think that would be an uncommonly silly policy which would deprive the company of some useful potential employees and annoy several more actual employees for no gain other than the employer's whim, but I still don't see why I or my government ought to prevent it. And I can't think of any good reason why it should be different for banning blogs.

Of course I'm just arguing about whether I think it ought to be the employer's right. Whether it actually is his right under the law, I don't know. One of the commenters on Sciolist questioned whether this policy could be a matter for the ACLU, as a First Amendment issue. Maybe. But I don't think there's a case at all until someone actually gets fired. As it happened, Doug chose to follow the policy and close down his blog. If he had continued posting on the blog, and the newspaper had fired him as a result, then there might be a case.

The libertarian in me wants to believe that the natural correction to stupid company policies is that employees will simply decline to work for stupid employers. Non-libertarians explain to me why that's unrealistic, and at some brain level I see their evidence and believe them. At the heart level, I can't quite accept it because the idea of feeling stuck in a job is so foreign to me.

If it were me, I almost certainly would have walked out. I wouldn't have tried to fight it or anything; I just would have said, "OK, in that case I can't work here any more, so I guess I have to quit. Bye." But as my friends know, I'm an oddball who tends to leave jobs any time I've saved up a little money and would rather spend my days doing something else, so that doesn't really prove anything. In fact, even if I were working at the paper in some non-editorial capacity unaffected by the no-blog policy, if Doug were to resign in protest I would have resigned along with him in solidarity, just because corporate bullshit annoys me and I like to walk away from it any chance I get.

All of my best talents are of the passive variety. I'm good at things like tolerance and patience, bad at things like discipline and initiative. I suppose this applies to me politically as well. I'm not much for active activism, but I'm good at passive activism -- like boycotts. That's easy. All you have to do is just don't participate. Heck, I can do that in my sleep. (Literally.)

Here's the paragraph from the newspaper's announcement that I found most interesting:

What is it that concerns them here? That editorial employees like Doug appear to be impartial, or that they actually are impartial? It seems to me that as the owner of a newspaper, you want your news desk editor to be fair in how he chooses the stories for the news pages. Or perhaps you want him to have a certain political bias, but in any case you have an idea of what sort of judgment he should bring to the job. I would think that you'd be watching to see whether he does that job. If he expresses wacko opinions on the Internet but still does a good job, then why do you care about his opinions? On the other hand, if he's skewing the newspaper to serve his own political agenda, then that's a good reason to fire him regardless of what he writes on his blog.

The more serious concern about this paragraph, I think, is that it suggests that the newspaper believes that the essence of being impartial is to not have personal opinions. This is something Darcy and I discussed way back in that debate about Orcinus's "media manifesto". He and I disagreed about many other media-related things, but one thing that we did agree on -- and I think Doug would, too -- is that the mainstream news media today has screwed-up notion of what it means to be impartial. They seem to think that the essence of impartiality is to not betray any opinion at all. If spokesman A says, "is so" and spokesman B says, "is not", then the media's job is to give voice to both sides and leave it at that. That's what they mean by "impartial".

Well, that sounds nice, but it's stupid. If spokesman A is just plain wrong and it really isn't so, and that can be readily demonstrated by simple reporting, then a decent journalist will point that out. Yes, this requires leaving editorial decisions to human judgment, and that in turn opens the door to the possibility of that personal bias that the publishers are so determined to avoid. But what is the alternative? To use no judgment at all? That's what the news media does now. The result is that the news has become stupider. The result is that the news media has become a vehicle for whichever side is able to shout its lies the loudest.

Another intriguing fact is that Doug happens to work for a newspaper where the staff is predominantly liberal. While Doug is certainly not a toe-the-line Bush conservative, he's definitely not a liberal, so the political opinion that he might or might not allow to pollute the impartiality of the paper is a minority opinion. Doug's political view is not one that prevails at his newspaper. How then does it make the newspaper seem less impartial for anyone to read his views elsewhere?

One of Doug's comments attached to that last Sciolist post suggests that perhaps I'm all wrong about the newspaper trying to stamp out all political opinions. He mentions that the newspaper doesn't have any problem at all with employees flaunting their liberal opinions. Perhaps this move is directed specifically at Doug in order to shut him up.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It sucks for Doug, of course, but in terms of journalistc standards I find that less offensive. Maybe their real goal is to be a newspaper with a point of view and they want to drive out any conservatives. OK. I don't have a problem with advocacy journalism, so long as it's honest. My only complaint in this case is that targeting his blog is a nasty tactic. If they don't want him on the staff, they should just come right out and say so.

Here's where my libertarian side comes out again. I really have no problem with the newspaper saying, "We're liberal, you're not, so we don't want you to work for us." But obviously they couldn't get away with that. If that were to happen, then Doug really could sue them, and he could be a big hero at National Review Online and go on to earn ridiculous speaking fees like Dinesh D'Souza.

One thing that really surprised me, when looking into this, was to find that the newspaper Doug works for is one of the few that is independently owned. Most city newspapers these days are owned by one of the media conglomerates like Knight-Ridder or Gannett. I was wondering which soulless corporate automaton came up with this ridiculous anti-blog policy, so I went to look it up. Doug declined to ever name his employer on Sciolist, and I will likewise decline here, but said employer has a webpage that lists all its staff, so if you happen to know Doug's last name or his hometown, it's pretty easy to track down.

It turns out that this particular newspaper is owned by a local family which has been in the newspaper business in that particular city for more than a century. Furthermore, that same family owns both the daily newspapers in that city, having bought out the competitor way back in 1928. Even then, the two newspapers had opposite political views, and the family elected to keep it that way. The two papers have separate and independent editorial staffs. One is openly "Democratic-Liberal", and the other is openly "Republican-Conservative". (The family's third paper, a weekly, professes to be politically independent.) Doug works for the liberal paper.

I'm not sure what relevance this has to the discussion of blog policy, but I found it interesting nonetheless. It wasn't at all what I expected.

One parting observation about the Sciolist: It was only about a week ago that I discovered that sciolist is not a made-up word, nor is it a type of list. Rather, a sciolist is one who practices sciolism -- though I wonder if this isn't a case like purism or pianism, where the ist is more common than the ism.

According to Merriam Webster, sciolism is "a superficial show of learning". I'm not sure if the title is supposed to be ironic or merely humble. (About an inch lower on the page, I see two intriguing relatives of scissors: something which is easily cut is scissile and the act of cutting it is scission. On an entirely different page, the same dictionary tells me that pianism really is the art and technique of playing the piano. It does not, however, tell me what to call the art and technique of playing the organ.)

Before I even had a chance to miss Sciolist, I've already found another new blog that I like, Done With Mirrors. Judging from the URL, I would guess that the editor of this blog is someone named Vernon Dent. But as far as I can tell this Mr Dent -- if that is his real name -- doesn't ever post. Instead, he leaves that to a frequent guest, a guy who calls himself "Callimachus" and who reminds me of Doug in a lot of ways.

Too bad about that miserable color scheme though. Yecch.

Postscript: I didn't want to interrupt the narrative when it occurred, but way up there somewhere I wrote sentences in which media took a singular verb. If you were planning to educate me about that, save your breath. I've heard the argument and I don't buy it.

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