Professionalism
Rich has been pretty critical of this Fumento person (who I’ve never heard of except on Rich’s blog, by the way). And, at last count, Rich is definitely winning the battle between the two. Rich received an email from the guy which states:
But the nice thing about all this is that you are an absolute nobody who can publish nowhere outside of his own blog site that I never would have heard of had my name not come up. I am a weekly syndicated health and science columnist who is read each week by literally millions of people. One of my SARS pieces was in the New York Post, with over three million readers alone. Do you get three million hits in one day?
So then Mr. Fumento, why do you feel the need to justify your actions to an absolute nobody? I suppose it’s worse to be outwitted by a nobody than to be outwitted by a somebody. At least the somebody will draw attention to you.
August 14th, 2003 at 10:48 am
I wasn’t trying to justify my actions. It began months ago with a nice, polite explanation of why he shouldn’t be blogging about how wrong I was on SARS when in fact the epidemic was already on the point of fizzling out. But as I have long since found out, you cannot reason with an Atkins cultist (I have two hate mail pages on my website devoted to wicked letters from Atkins cultists). Among other things, they’re almost universally fat, as is Rich Hailey. So at that point I let reason fly to four winds and went overboard, but it IS fair to point out that the defender of a diet who refuses to look at the data should not be fat and that Rich Hailey is fat. I have also noted elsewhere that diet guru Suzanne Sommers has had liposuction and diet guru Dean Ornish has big fat jowls. You might call those insults, but I call them evidence that there’s something wrong with this picture.
It is also fair to say that if I really do believe Hailey is a nobody, and all the evidence indicates he is, I had no reason to fly off the handle at anything he happens to blog about me. I’ve gotten very nice references from the few bloggers that really count and I should be satisified with that and not worry about guys that I myself claim (apparently with a certain degree of accuracy, judging from the lack of letters I’ve gotten on this) has only two readers. The bottom line is that Hailey was being unprofessional in his views, no matter how few people care about those views, but I had no reason to try to match him tit-for-tat on unprofessionalism. My work does speak for itself. I was right on SARS and if Hailey doesn’t know it, pretty much everybody else who’s read my writing does. From now on, I’m not even going to bother trying to convince people who I myself concede aren’t worth the effort.
Best,
Mike Fumento
August 14th, 2003 at 11:13 am
My issue is not the science involved, but the fact you resorted to childish, nanny-nanny-boo-boo rhetoric. It should be apparent that that is beneath your station as a best selling author and syndicated columnist.
Other issues include:
You misrepresented his audience size.
You either lied or could not copy and paste a quote; and that was used in an effort to discredit Rich.
And the review mentioned elsewhere on my site is also critical of your statements and alleges you fudged some data.
As for these allegations, it seems you can not rationally debate them so you resort to name-calling.
August 14th, 2003 at 12:56 pm
Nice try, Michael, but it’s too late to spin this your way. That’s the nice thing about blogs; the links are there, and anybody who wants can follow the entire course of our discussion, and determine who was unprofessional. As anyone can easily verify, the first insults flew in your August 10th comment, reposted here, written several weeks after our last exchange, which was basically civil. The aggressive tone of your letter was clear. You were looking for a fight, trolling for material. Instead, you got a reasoned argument, several hard questions, and an embarrassingly easy deconstruction of your latest piece. No wonder you flew off the handle!
Had you chosen to address my arguments, you may have convinced people that you were correct, and that I was wrong. Instead, you chose the easy path of insult and attack, and wound up alienating even those who agree with you.
By the way, I’d appreciate it if when you make a typo while quoting me, you either fix it, or properly attribute the error to yourself.
August 14th, 2003 at 12:59 pm
By the way, here’s the “nice, polite explanation” he referred to:
August 21st, 2003 at 2:50 am
Volunteer Tailgate Party Vol. IX
First off on a personal note, I haven’t been blogging much lately. The reason is that I just moved and only yesterday finally got my phone line working. DSL will be arriving next week, so things should be a little…
October 11th, 2003 at 12:44 am
Volunteer Tailgate Party Vol. IX
First off on a personal note, I haven’t been blogging much lately. The reason is that I just moved and only yesterday finally got my phone line working. DSL will be arriving next week, so things should be a little…
November 26th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
[…] Mike Fumento, who I’ve talked about before, poked fun at us insignificant blogs before starting his own. He also acted like a prick in an exchange between himself and Rich Hailey. […]