NYT Profiles A3G
posted by Daniel Solove
In the New York Times today, there’s an interesting profile of David Lat (aka A3G), the author of the blog Underneath Their Robes and soon-to-be author of the popular political gossip blog Wonkette. Some highlights include the reaction of the U.S. Attorney’s office where Lat worked when he revealed he was A3G:
Calls from news media organizations came pouring into the United States attorney’s office. The spokesman for the office, Michael Drewniak, was fuming. Mr. Lat was told by his superiors that it would be wise to take the site down, and he did. He was also told not to return calls from the news media, and he did not.
As the week progressed, Mr. Lat, a slight man with a habit of blinking hard when he is nervous, heard nothing from the boss, United States Attorney Christopher J. Christie. Some colleagues told Mr. Christie that what Mr. Lat did was wildly inappropriate, and that he should be fired. Others tried to convince him that this 30-year-old son of Filipino immigrants, a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, was an otherwise model employee who had simply made a mistake and deserved another chance.
While this office intrigue played out, Mr. Lat placed a call to Mr. Christie’s secretary.
“He’s not ready to meet with you yet,” she told him.
And so he waited. And worried. Finally, on Thursday, Mr. Christie summoned Mr. Lat to his well-appointed room with sweeping views of Newark Liberty Airport and the Manhattan skyline. Mr. Christie settled into a couch and fixed his gaze on the young lawyer.
“You put us in an awkward position,” he said.
On Lat’s endeavor to be an anonymous blogger:
This bizarre and satirical view of the judiciary was created, for the most part, in Mr. Lat’s apartment on 53rd Street in Manhattan, although he often responded to readers’ e-mail messages from his office in Newark. He would later learn that this was a terrible mistake; some tech-savvy readers, including Judge Kozinski, had already learned the true identity of Article III Groupie. . . .
And he concluded: “It’s hard to lead this double life. It eats at you after a while. I wanted that tension to be resolved after a while. It’s like you have this secret and it’s gnawing at you.”
On Lat’s meeting with his boss Christopher Christie about his blogging:
Mr. Christie did most of the talking. He told his young assistant that he should have given the office a proper head’s up, and at the very least let them know that an article was coming. But Mr. Lat’s fears were quickly allayed when Mr. Christie took a fatherly tone and praised him for his work.
And while Mr. Lat said he was prepared to offer his resignation, Mr. Christie said he did not want it. According to Mr. Lat, he said: “I don’t think it would be in your interest, or the office’s interest for you to leave so precipitously. I’m not asking for your resignation, so I don’t want to get blamed for your resignation.”
Mr. Lat concluded, “He did not want me to be some cause célèbre or some First Amendment martyr.”
But it was subtly suggested that if any opportunities arose through the blogging, he might be want to look into it.
Lat’s views about his writing and about accuracy:
Mr. Lat, who will take over the site in the coming weeks with co-editor Alex Pareene, a 20-year-old New York University dropout, says that he does not hold himself to conventional reporting standards. “Some of the things I do are journalist-esque,” he said, “but I don’t consider myself a journalist.”
“Fact-checking on the Web is: you put up something on the Web and if it’s wrong, somebody e-mails you and tells you it’s wrong, and you put something up saying, ‘It’s wrong.’”
A colleague muses about the dual sides to David Lat’s personality:
Ms. Golin, an avid blog reader, said she is intrigued to see where Wonkette goes from here: “David was on this one side a hard-core Federalist Society type, who clerked for an extremely hard-right judge, and was way to the right of most of his associates. And he had this whole other side of flamboyant, theater-watching, Oscar-watching, shoe-loving, litigatrix. How do these two sides get reconciled?”
There’s much more in the article.
Related Posts:
1. Solove, Article III Groupie Groupie
2. Solove, Is Anonymous Blogging Possible?
3. Solove, The Mysterious Disappearance of Article III Groupie
4. Solove, Article III Groupie Disrobed: Thoughts on Blogging and Anonymity
January 22, 2006 at 11:26 am
Posted in: Anonymity, Blogging
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Fedlawyerguy - January 22, 2006 at 7:32 pm
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