Brick

Colum­nist Stu Bykof­sky of the Philadel­phia Daily News, despite being quite the extro­vert, rarely finds him­self a news sub­ject. It’s because he’s first a jour­nal­ist, although with his in-your-face style, that might seem sur­pris­ing. This week, how­ever, Bykof­sky has landed in the cable yaks war, “yaks” being those chat-show hosts on the 24/7 news/comment chan­nels, with arti­cles in major pub­li­ca­tions and blogs elsewhere.

A quick sum-up. Bykof­sky in his Nov. 4, 2010, col­umn gave the results of a con­tent analy­sis he did on whether the right’s Bill O’Reilly on Fox News or the left’s Keith Olber­mann on MSNBC showed more oppos­ing views on their pro­grams. “Byko’s” piece can be seen as an analy­sis fol­low­ing the gen­eral elec­tions of Nov. 2. Olber­mann he found had less dis­sent on his show. Olber­mann was sus­pended Nov. 5–8 (cross­ing a week­end) for vio­lat­ing NBC News pol­icy by mak­ing polit­i­cal cam­paign contributions.

Bykof­sky wanted to write a follow-up and tried to con­tact Olber­mann by e-mail. They had a testy writ­ten dia­logue, which some­how came to be pub­lished at the blog Phawker.com. Those who know Bykof­sky can just hear his sar­casm. The trou­ble is, Olber­mann sounded to the colum­nist like he would sound, too, but he wasn’t.

Olber­mann denied writ­ing the e-mails. Con­ser­v­a­tive cable yak Tucker Carl­son has con­firmed he pre­tended to be Olber­mann and wrote the e-mails to Bykof­sky. Carl­son bought the web­site keitholbermann.com, includ­ing the address keith@keitholbermann.com. Carl­son told Yahoo News: “Could you resist? It was just too funny.”

I’m not sure who’s the worse off for this, except Bykof­sky, maybe. Olber­mann is inno­cent here. Carl­son had a gotcha. Byko? Well, he did not print Olbermann/Carlson’s e-mails so he did not mis­quote. If some­how this didn’t get out, it would’ve just been a rou­tine day for Bykof­sky: calls, mes­sages, deadlines.

The Philly Daily News reports what hap­pened here, and The New York Times ver­sion is here.

Bykof­sky wrote me the following:

I got punk’d, as part of my quest to reach Olber­mann for com­ment. I made an hon­est effort, and the whole story wouldn’t have been had not some­one leaked it out. I also did a Mon­day piece on the Olber­mann escapade. As far as I can tell, he didn’t respond to ANY reporter seek­ing his side. Today, I answered EVERY media’s request, from the NYTimes to Forbes.”

There’s a les­son here for us scribes of both the repor­to­r­ial and colum­niz­ing vari­eties. If Bykof­sky wanted a sec­ond follow-up he might well have quoted Carlson-as-Olbermann. He says the tone sure sounded like Olbermann’s.

My Bykof­sky quote from above. Was it really my friend of some seven years Stu? It sure sounds like him, and it’s the e-mail address I always use for Stu. It might be his wife writ­ing while he’s watch­ing a game on TV, or it might my for­mer col­league Tucker, if he was a hacker or knew one to invade the newspaper’s servers.

We have to start being more care­ful when con­duct­ing online, e-mail or text-message interviews.

Per­sonal notes. Tucker in around 1996 was an assis­tant edi­to­r­ial writer at my news­pa­per, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He was in his late 20s then, pre–Weekly Stan­dard and pre-cable yak. I liked him. He was a gen­uine preppy (I knew some while attend­ing Stan­ford), as in hav­ing attended pri­vate board­ing school, with quiet wit and urban­ity. He was in edi­to­r­ial and me news so we didn’t hang out, just ban­ter in the ele­va­tor etc.; also he already was begin­ning a fam­ily so he did not go to par­ties or bars like the rest of us. But I liked him. He showed ele­ments of kind­ness and loy­alty. Now? He’s in his early 40s so I try to pic­ture where he’ll be when he hits 50. I can’t guess.

Stu is Stu. He’s a loud big-city news­man. As an Arkie I’m not used to those, yet some­how we hit it off from the start, through NSNC con­fer­ences. He’s a ras­cal, but his ethics are strong. If Stu was at fault in this, I’d be report­ing it, though. Stu the news­man would understand.

A shorter-by-two-paragraphs ver­sion of this appears at columnists.com