SkaroffBlog

I missed the article yesterday, but Atrios does a good job of finding posts pointing out the remarkable hypocrisy and blatant rancor in Helaine Olen’s article about firing her nanny because of her anonymous blog in this weekend’s New York Times. It begins…

OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she’d had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.

Olen goes on to further disparage her by citing “semi-promiscuous couplings,” “too much drinking,” and suspicions of “boozy nights out followed by coming to work hungover.” All this despite repeated affirmations of an affinity for “this younger version of myself.” She even admits “I could say that I, too, once stayed out late, drank too much and slept with the wrong people.”

If you read the entire article I’m sure there are elements of which a parent can empathize with. But why is an employee anonymously blogging about her employer a fireable offense while the same employer writing about the employee is journalism? It all seems a bit elitist and condescending. Fortunately because these are blogs, our dear nanny can fire right back in a point-by-point refutation of Olen:

I am not a pill popping alcoholic who has promiscuous sex and cares nothing for the children for whom she works with. Nope. If you look carefully through my archives, instead you will find a young woman in her mid-twenties who decided to work as a nanny for a year while she prepared to enter the next phase of her professional life; namely the life of an academic pursuing a PhD in English Literature specifically focusing on the Late Victorian novel.

Further proof that perhaps it is blogs that will pick up the mantle of abrogated responsiblity left behind by the mainstream media.

Ok, maybe that’s a bit grandiose. But the whole thing is interesting and inspiring lots of great commentary from the blogosphere.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2005 at 11:21 am and is tagged as Blogostan, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.