Front Sight/Hsieh Flap Revisited
Apr 15, 04 | 5:06 pm by John T. KennedyAnyone remember this? About a month ago Diana Hsieh made her first update to her Scientology page since 2002: “20 March 2004: Front Sight’s lawsuit against me is still ongoing.
News of the suit rippled through the blogosphere in November of 2002. Nearly all bloggers came down on Hsieh’s side. They were also overwhelmingly of the opinion that the suit would buy Front Sight a world of hurt. The Instapundit wrote:
It’s obvious that Front Sight’s lawsuit has so far bought it far more bad publicity than Diana Hsieh’s blogging ever did.
Emperor Misha weighed in, as did Kim du Toit. Mike at Cold Fury wrote of the suit:
This kind of thing only really works when nobody knows about it.
John Hiler at Microcontent News wrote:
It’ll be interesting to see if any mass media picks up on this made-for-TV headline: “Church of Scientology sues Blogger!”(…)
In other words: sue a blogger at your own risk!
Arthur Silber acted as a clearinghouse for updates on the story. He thanked Reynolds and Hiler and expressed optimism about the power of the blogosphere to assist Hsieh:
I cannot express my gratitude to both Glenn Reynolds and John Hiler for bringing so much attention to this matter. As I’ve said before, I think the exposure of this information on such a wide scale may well bring a very early end to this unfortunate business, and I think that would be an absolutely wonderful result.
Silber sounded a call to action:
As a result, one of the most important things you can do — if you care about justice, and the cause of gun rights in general — is to spread the information that is already publicly available as far and wide as you can. That alone may well help to defeat at least one of the purposes of this lawsuit, and it may mean there will be an end to it much sooner than otherwise would occur.
So what happened?
In the blogosphere: Nothing. By the end of November the net went dead silent on the matter and has remained so for almost a year and a half.
April 15th, 2004 at Apr 15, 04 | 7:36 pm
Bloggers do have a great deal of power… more than they know, I suspect, particularly where it comes to changing, or at least reinforcing public opinion.
However; Whatever else blogging is, it is CURRENT, for the most part. If something isn’t moving, bloggers, particularly in current events/commentary type blogs, (Such as Glenn, Misha, or Mike, for example) are not likely to write about it. Indeed, think of what brought you yourself to being it up, John; there was movement on the page, apparently initiated by Diana Hsieh herself.
The other outlets as you mention..(DuToit, Silber, et al) tend not to be as current events driven… being more discussion oriented… and thereby may very well write about it, but are perhaps not as likley to be picked up by other blogs(who are mostly curent events), who would then get a fire going.
(There are some other problems of late with a few of this type which I won’t get drawn into here, which also tend to detract from the effectiveness of a call to action issued by any of them. In any event…)
Suits tend not to be written about in such media, except at their inception and their conclusion, or by chance if some major point/revelation is brought up in a public hearing. Thus, I’m afraid keeping this in the public eye is not easy, and in the normal formatics of ‘current events’ bloging, is nigh on impossible. Since none of these has happened, save for what you’ve pointed out here, I guess I’m not overly shocked we’ve not seen much of all of this, until now.