Old media? Has this guy ever browsed with his browser?

Fitzgerald said he would follow the “Bambi Rule” espoused by Thumper: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”

His plaint echoed one by Heidi Julavits in 2003 in The Believer, a magazine founded by Eggers. She wondered if reviews could strive for “loftier service” to the culture and deplored snark as “a reflexive disorder.”

Julavits was echoing a 2000 Eggers interview with The Harvard Advocate. Replying to a question about selling out, Eggers chided Harvard students: “Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic, and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them.”

In a wonderful essay on Gawker last week, Tom Scocca excoriated the pompous and often vapid niceness brigade. Snark can be overdone, he wrote, but it is better than smarm, which “is never a force for good. A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says, ‘Don’t Be Evil,’ rather than making sure it does not do evil.”

The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell tried to riposte in a post called “Being Nice Isn’t Really So Awful,” but wandered into a silly argument about satire propping up, rather than subverting, the privileged and the status quo.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, notes that we label food if we believe it has deleterious consequences and critics are perfectly within their rights to label books in the same way.

“In the very first issue of my magazine, almost 100 years ago,” he told me, “Rebecca West established what she called ‘the duty of harsh criticism,’ and she was right. An intellectual has a solemn obligation to speak out negatively against ideas or books that he or she believes will have a pernicious or misleading effect upon people’s understanding of important things. To do otherwise would be cowardly and irresponsible.