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'Snark vs. smarm' goes mainstream

So it's not exactly the Dreyfus Affair, but the argument over "snark" and "smarm" that Gawker's Tom Scocca launched two weeks ago has turned into a divisive intellectual debate on which the likes of Malcolm Gladwell, Maureen Dowd and Leon Wieseltier have all weighed in.

When people talk about debates in the media today, they're often referring to trivial Twitter spats that flare out as quickly as they came. So it's nice to see marquee writers engaging in a media debate that matters. As Dowd wrote in her New York Times column on Sunday, "All quarrels are not petty. Sometimes quarrels are about big things, and it’s an actual privilege to take a side in them."

Dowd doesn't exactly explain why the "snark" vs. "smarm" debate matters, but it does. It's not just about niceness vs. meanness, nor is it only about the obligations of intellectual criticism (a worthwhile subject in its own right); it's about journalism, and its interests and obligations.

To bring you up to speed: In early November, Isaac Fitzgerald, the first-ever Books editor for BuzzFeed, a site unapologetically driven by the quest for clicks, told Poynter that the site wouldn't be publishing negative reviews: “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Instead, Fitzgerald would follow the advice of Thumper, the rabbit from "Bambi": “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”

One month later, Scocca responded with an extraordinarily long castigation of Fitzgerald's "smarm," which he defined thusly: "What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance — an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. ... Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can't everyone just be nicer?"

The piece wasn't just an attack on what Dowd today described as "the pompous and often vapid niceness brigade," it was also an attack on BuzzFeed. At BuzzFeed, Scocca wrote, "agreeability is popularity, and popularity is value" — people want to share agreeable things, nice things, hence agreeable content goes viral. In an introduction to Scocca's piece, Gawker founder Nick Denton called that a "collective delusion" and hit BuzzFeed for trafficking in "the hollow exchange of insincerity between people who don't really know each other or trust each other."

The debate might have died there, but then Malcolm Gladwell, a popular writer flying under the flag of public intellectual, picked it up in a blog post for The New Yorker titled “Being Nice Isn’t Really So Awful." In true Gladwellian fashion, he turned a handful of disparate and selective examples into evidence for general truths, urging the reader along to an "a-ha!" conclusion that was rendered utterly nonsensical and irrelevant once you actually took the time to think about it. His point: That satire (are we still talking about snark?) is not a revolt against smarm because it has been institutionalized and therefore rendered ineffective at challenging the status quo.

Several others weighed in — at Esquire, the author Stephen Marche argued that snark and smarm are two sides of the same coin, that coin being a writer's desire to make a buck: "People do not write hate-pieces for the improvement of society. They write hate-pieces in order to get noticed and to make a little money. The logic of the market has one primary feature: Nobody escapes it."

And finally, today, Dowd dedicated her column to the debate, not offering perspective so much as serving as a vehicle for Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, to offer perspective, which she endorsed: “If one feels that a value or a belief or a form that one cherishes has been traduced, one should rise to its defense," Wieseltier told Dowd. "In intellectual and literary life, where the stakes may be quite high, manners must never be the primary consideration. People who advance controversial notions should be prepared for controversy. Questions of truth, meaning, goodness, justice and beauty are bigger than Bambi. I never thought I’d utter a sentence like this, but I stand with Gawker against BuzzFeed.”

Which brings us back to Fitzgerald's remark, his "Bambi Rule," an anti-intellectual worldview in which there is no room for critical thinking. Fitzgerald admittedly has no interest in literary criticism. As such, "BuzzFeed Books" is more of a marketing platform, both intended — there is the usual sponsored content — and otherwise. The top three items on BuzzFeed Books as I write this are: "Which Middle Earth Character Are You?" (Go see the new Hobbit film!), "Harry Potter Emojis Are What Your Phone Needs Immediately" (How great is Harry Potter! Am I right?) and "The 14 Greatest Science Fiction Books Of The Year."

That this suffocating, Generation-X Hallmark sensibility exists is fine; BuzzFeed can do whatever it wants, and its founders are likely not-paying-attention-to-this-debate all the way to the bank. It's a smart business strategy, appealing as it does to the lowest common denominator, and so, like daytime television and top 40 radio before it, it has become increasingly omnipresent. Indeed, it's often heralded as the next iteration of digital journalism (see Upworthy, the year-old site that bills itself as "the place to find awesome, meaningful, visual things to share").

But the Bambi Rule evangelism — the "no haters" mentality, the finger-wagging at criticism — is intolerable. It marginalizes and even demonizes critical thought, the one thing that is essential for separating the wheat from the chaff. It allows for the proliferation of hucksterism. And it promotes the idea that Wieseltier's "questions of truth, meaning, goodness, justice and beauty" don't matter.

Of course, if hawking chaff is your trade, I can understand why the Bambi Rule appeals.