"Sock puppet" incident embarrasses The New Republic, loses blogger his job

Lee Siegel, a senior editor at The New Republic (partly owned by the Aspers) and creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for TNR.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine and his blog was shut down after revelations that he was involved in anonymously attacking readers who criticized his posts. This, according to a story in the New York Times.

"...a reader accused him of using a “sock puppet,” or Internet alias, to attack his critics in the comments section of his blog. An editor’s apology replaced the blog on the Web site, announcing that the blog would no longer be published and noting that The New Republic deeply regretted “misleading” its readers.

"Franklin Foer, the New Republic’s editor, said in an interview that he first became aware of the accusations against Mr. Siegel on Thursday afternoon, after a colleague noticed a comment in the Talkback section of Mr. Siegel’s blog that accused him of using the alias “sprezzatura” to defend his articles and assail his critics.

"That comment, posted by a reader named “jhschwartz” on Aug. 27, said that “sprezzatura appears only to weigh in on TNR forums to admonish and taunt posters who dislike Lee Siegel” before concluding, “I would say with 99% confidence that ‘sprezzatura’ is a Siegel alias.”

“ 'We launched an investigation,' Mr. Foer said. He added that he was confident that sprezzatura’s posts were written with Mr. Siegel’s “full cooperation,” but declined to say whether the alias was used by Mr. Siegel himself because the affair was still under investigation. 'As soon as the facts of the case became clear to me on Friday, we closed down the blog and made an announcement.' Mr. Foer said that while he liked to see blog posts before they were published, Mr. Siegel did not have an editor assigned to his blog entries.

"In a statement by e-mail, Mr. Siegel said, 'I’m sorry about my prank, which was certainly not designed to harm a magazine that has been my happy intellectual home for many years.' ”

["Sprezzatura" is an Italian term for 'studied carelessness'.]