The Wild West of the Internet
January 6th, 2008
I recently received a letter from a journalism professor in Missouri asking if I’d be interested in being an interview subject for students in his media ethics class. The theme is the “Wild West” of the internet and the wide range of reporting ethics exhibited by blogs.The “Wild West,” for those of you who aren’t of the spaghetti western generation, generally refers to the late 1800’s, when the American frontier was being claimed and tamed by settlers. It was a time when wars, with Native Americans and between settlers, were commonplace. Much of the land was lawless, and disputes weren’t usually settled in court, but by fists and guns.
It’s not a bad analogy. Bloggers are something like the settlers, albeit in cyberspace. While virtually anyone can have a blog, free for the taking in many places, it takes work and dedication to keep a site thriving. It takes a good crop of material to interest readers, and consistency to keep them coming back. And like the Wild West, the internet is often fraught with disputes. “Blog wars” are not that uncommon, and the list of crimes that originate from cyberspace are diverse, ranging from fraud to harassment to murder. The internet has proven that it can be as deadly as any Remington – or simply that it has the potential to rise to the same level of risk-taking and bad intent that’s inherent in some of its users.
Yet, there’s another side to the Wild West of the internet that rarely makes the 5:00 news. Like the true pioneers of the 19th century, who forged through unknown terrain to better their lives and create their legacies, many of today’s bloggers are trailblazers in internet space, creating new ways to share information, exchange ideas, and communicate with others.
The Wild West had the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The 21st century internet has that, plus the strange or unusual. Nothing exemplified these qualities more in 2007 than the case of Howard K. Stern.
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I started this blog in 2007 writing about the cable television trials of Stern, the long-time friend and attorney of Anna Nicole Smith. Having grown up in an era and a household that revered journalism, and where Cronkite, Bernstein, and Woodward were household names, I was stunned by the irresponsible and openly tabloid-assisted coverage of Smith’s death on cable news stations such as CNN, MSNBC, and CourtTV. Far from mere commentary, journalists and television attorneys alike engaged in a hyped-up form of speculation and witch hunting that was unparalleled.
I searched online to see how far television’s poison had spread, wanting to believe that a solid majority of other news-watching adults would be as outraged as I was. Instead, I found literally thousands of people echoing the gossip they heard on TV as both facts and judgment, and only a relatively small pocket of people who were speaking out against trial-by-television.
These two groups battled each other like the Hatfields and McCoys on discussion blogs and gossip sites, and called each other, among names not suitable to print, Antinoids and Sternoids. Team Howard or Team Virgie. Team Delusional or Team Stupid. Battlefield lines were drawn, and the constant news and gossip surrounding the case provided an abundance of ammunition.
However, much of the ammo provided by television and gossip sites proved to be the equivalent of blanks. Except these blanks weren’t innocuous – they were full of lies, and theories passed off as truths. Nancy Grace, the famed child advocate of CNN and CourtTV, was perhaps one of the worst offenders. Gossip-guru Harvey Levin appeared on her show and was presented to the audience as a reputable news source. Grace, who’s an eye-rolling master of feigned incredulity, acted as judge and jury member in her made-for-TV witch hunt. There were so many lies spread by guests on her show, and treated as gospel by Grace, that they could fill a Ph.D. thesis on modern-day propaganda. When the lies were discovered and outed by other media sources, Grace often failed to inform her audience, or – as in the case of the Kimberly Walther website that attacked Stern, which was later determined to be a fake not owned or supported by Walther – offered a breezy, short one-sentence correction before launching into the next uninformed attack
To be fair, there was an embarrassment of talking heads, television pundits, and salacious gossip hounds filling the airwaves, and no shortage of cable news shows who hosted them. Greta Van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera, and even the TV Guide channel jumped into the ratings-driven fray, not only insinuating that Stern murdered Smith and her son, but pronouncing it as a verdict.
It was the small pocket of bloggers previously described, and not cable television producers, who started demanding the facts and researching the various media stories and their sources.
Pooling their resources and talents, a diverse group of bloggers from all over the United States came together online in an effort to separate fact from fiction and speculation from truth. It was a blogger named Butterfly who originally discovered G. Ben Thompson’s arrest record. It was another blogger, known only as KimA., who painstakingly pieced together the many branches of Anna Nicole Smith’s confusing family tree. There were dozens of bloggers analyzing information and misinformation, and it was not long before the “small pocket” of truth seekers had filled hundreds of cyber-pages, providing an online counterweight to the unbalanced media coverage, which continued even past the point of a coroner’s declaration of accidental death.
My own research, aided by KimA’s genealogy chart, allowed me to find Anna’s “lost” stepbrother – the one Virgie Arthur did not name as a son in court even though she named her other stepchild. He was in prison on a rape charge. The cable news media, which seemed to be in a collusive rally against Stern, never did try to get the scoop on Virgie Arthur and family, even as Arthur waged several legal battles in an attempt to gain custody or visitation of Anna’s remaining child, Dannielynn, and exert control over her estate.
In one of her last public appearances, shortly after the death of her son Daniel and her mother’s televised accusations of foul play, Anna told Entertainment Tonight that she suffered abuse while under Arthur’s care, including rape. The accusation, unchecked and largely unquestioned by the media, languished in the distant background of a story that was focused on Stern as the all-evil perpetrator of death.
Bloggers seemed to be the only ones interested in the veracity of Anna’s abuse claims. They shook the family tree, and out fell the rotten fruit – and convictions for kidnaping, child molestation, and rape. And all the branches, whether maternal or marital, led to Virgie Arthur. If one were to believe only what they heard about Arthur and her family on cable news shows, they would empathize with her as a wronged mother, a retired police officer, and the mother of an FBI agent. They would not have known about her five marriages or the abundance of crime in her family.
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Truths discovered online didn’t always make the news and, as in the case of Arthur, were most often treated as short sound bites or flat-out ignored. In any event, despite what bloggers may know or learn as fact – and no matter how passionate they are about a subject – legal matters such as guilt and innocence, custodial rights and parental fitness, and what constitutes libel and slander, are not decided in public forums, but in courts.
However, like the Hatfields and McCoys, the bloggers could not stop fighting, even as the various facets of the Stern story faded from the news and were taken up by the legal system.
Not only did the Pro’s and Anti’s fight each other, they fought amongst themselves, often taking the fight to stunningly personal and vindictive levels. Left with little else to research, some of the “Pro” bloggers turned upon each other, using personal information they gained during a time of online kinship to excoriate, spread misinformation about, and “expose” others. Private emails became passed around like grade school notes. Background reports were pulled, names and other personal information were revealed, and nefarious motives became assigned to – well, almost everyone involved at one time or another.
What started off as a search for the truth in a complex story being skewed by a one-note media became a battleground of interpersonal name calling, cross-accusations and even threats of blogger vs. blogger legal action.
Despite vehement cries of “innocent” from all corners, very few of the online participants, and none of the blog owners, including me, can properly claim that title. Defensiveness, whether its of one’s thoughts, work, intentions, or character is a knee-jerk response to being attacked, and ego is not just a Freudian concept of superfluous vanity, but a real part of every individual’s self-esteem and spirit. When what we know of ourselves to be true is distorted by others – when our thoughts, intentions and characters are misunderstood – or worse, deliberately misrepresented by others, it hurts. When we see ourselves branded by strangers with incorrect labels, and assigned motives that we never had, it’s human nature to react, and even to strike back – wanting not just to even the score, but to explain and to have our own truths understood.
Unfortunately, when it comes to human understanding, the playing field is not likely to be even, nor its players even-handed. In a way that’s especially particular to the online world, alliances, friendships, and loyalties to a certain concept or group tend to inform opinions and carry more weight than the plain, cold facts of others.
This blog, like all those that imposed facts on the Howard K. Stern story, not only had to contend with the crush of animosity from the vitriolic gossip crowd, but eventually from other “Pro” bloggers. For example, I took great offense when bloggers from another “Pro” site called me a media whore (and worse) after I spent months of free time, and lent no small amount of effort, to the story. I struck back, offending them when I said they were dishonest and hypocritical. Then they struck back, then I did, then they did, then – well, that unpleasant chapter faded, only to be brought back to life later by others who had their own interpersonal controversies. My stories on Stern were over, and even removed from my site, but my days in the “Pro”camp seemed to provide a grab bag of animus, not only for those who held a grudge against me personally, but for those who had complaints with others, and even those who supported my work.
Of course, I was also offended by accusations that I was a blogger-for-hire for the Stern camp, but considering that the rumor was born in the message board dregs of TMZ, I took it for what it was – dim-witted gossip. It hurts less when those you have nothing in common with attack you. It’s easier to brush off offenses when they come from people whose ideas and thoughts you have never shared.
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I would not have believed that Howard K. Stern would ever grow into something of a cult-like celebrity, online or elsewhere. I thought that once the verdict of Anna Nicole Smith’s accidental death was in, and paternity was established for Dannielynn, and the courts were left to clean up the residual messes, the media coverage would all but cease and bloggers would move on to other subjects.
Not so. In a short span of time, Howard K. Stern went from being Anna Nicole Smith’s barely- known but seemingly fawning attorney, to her pronounced life partner and the father of her baby, to childless and bereaved widow. Since Anna’s death nearly a year ago, he has been publicly accused of jurisdiction shopping, profiting from death, purposely stealing another man’s child, distributing drugs, taking drugs, engaging in fraud and theft, committing two murders, gay trysts, collusion, and more.
Even if Harrold Robbins were to rise from the dead to write this story as fiction, he probably could not sell it to a publisher. It’s simply too much melodrama for one book, even if it is a Hollywood tome, and certainly too much to believe of any one man.
The internet community, however, creates its own protagonists and antiheroes, and for the most part it’s a fairly black-and-white world. Those who once rallied around Stern as the victim of tabloid-style reporting, now lend their voices in support of his court cases and his post-Anna life. Many of them have created something of a hero or martyr out of the sad-eyed, reticent attorney, and some even fret over his health, his future, and his emotional well-being. They’ve created sites and tribute videos to commemorate the love between Anna and Howard. They’ve grown attached, it seems, to an image they helped create, and to protect that image and their investment in it, they will gleefully eviscerate Howard’s enemies, both those that exist in real life and those that are merely perceived in cyberspace.
On the Anti-side, Virgie Arthur is propped up as a victimized and prescient mother who predicted disaster for her daughter and who only wants to save her granddaughter from the same fate. John O’Quinn didn’t throw his white ten gallon hat into the legal ring for the money or publicity, but because he truly cares. It doesn’t matter what the coroner or police said – Stern, according to the Anti’s, is a diabolical Svengali figure who stole Anna’s free will at best, and her life at worst. It doesn’t matter that according to her own absentee mother, Anna was “wild” and “stubborn”, Stern was responsible for everything, from Anna’s escape to the Bahamas, to her words on Entertainment Tonight, to her tragic end.
Next month will mark the one year anniversary of Anna Nicole Smith’s death, but neither the Hatfields or McCoys – either those in the real-world legal arena, or those on the Wild West of the internet — seem anywhere close to waving a white flag, or giving an inch of hardscrabble territory. The shots continue to be fired, as much out of habit now it seems as anything else.
It took about eighteen years before the Hatfields and McCoy’s of that era agreed to end their battle, but the land was finite and the militia was mighty. (However, lest we imagine the feud actually ended then, the McCoy’s took the Hatfields to court in 2003 for visitation rights to an ancestral cemetery. It was only after that an “official” truce was declared). In the nearly lawless and infinite space of the internet, there’s no telling how long the Pro’s and the Anti’s will carry on their battles, either amongst themselves or against each other, but I suspect that some will still be feuding long after final gavel hits the last judge’s sound block.
Interesting Side Reading:
