A popular South African columnists not just reduced the blogosphere to a concert hall of air guitar players (which is pretty funny, you got to admit), but placed anonymous blogger "wackos" in a camp with the Virginia Tech shooter – and not so much in the metaphoric sense.
One blogger's calling it "Bullardgate," but it's more fun to call it "Bullard's hit", for obvious phonetic reasons. Don't know who David Bullard is? You probably wouldn't, if you don't live in South Africa. But suffice to say, regardless of who still loves him there (he's especially proud of himself, actually), David Bullard just lost all of his friends in the blogosphere.
A quick Googlified look into Bullard's history suggests that he's a pretty well-respected, if controversial at times, columnist for newspaper of record the Sunday Times, with a readership of over a million, according to
Ouch.
But if you think the self-righteous Bullard made some fair, if mean, points, you may start to doubt your own judgment (and Bullard's assertion that the Sunday Times's content goes through some rigorous process pre-publication) when you read the final rant.
One of the better gems:
I do, however, object to some anonymous,
"I hereby dub this Bullardgate," writes South African blogger
Questions remain: Was this the product of a journalist feeling threatened? Was it a botched joke, or, as they say in some circles, a brain fart? Or was it a breakdown of editorial oversight?
Lingham suggests it is one of many side effects accompanying a transition from traditional print to the frontier of digital media:"This is exactly the mentality that is leading to the decline of offline print as a source of information, because the people entrenched in the offline world are so resistant to change, they cannot keep up with the times."
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