New Republic Critic Tumbles in Blog-land: My ‘Dumb Mistake’

“I made a dumb mistake, and I’m very sorry I did it. I took the blogosphere’s bait, and I stooped to the level of these people who were commenting on my pieces, and I shouldn’t have,” Lee Siegel said. “And I’m especially sorry that I embarrassed a magazine that was nourishing me as an intellectual, long before it began publishing me as a journalist.”

The New Republic’s cultural critic was on the phone on Sept. 4, explaining what was coursing through his mind when he fired off comments in the “Talkback” section of his own New Republic blog, “Lee Siegel on Culture.” In the missives, he heaped praise on himself and insulted his critics—all under the anonymous handle “sprezzatura.”

Mr. Siegel’s barely camouflaged Internet self had offered him swift entry into the race to the bottom known as online reader commentary. In a sample posting, from Aug. 27, “sprezzatura” wrote to another poster, a nemesis named “jhschwartz”: “You’re a fraud, and a liar. And a wincingly pretentious writer. You couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces.”

“It never occurred to me” that it was wrong, the 48-year-old Mr. Siegel said of his frame of mind at the time. “This is really cowboy territory, with very few boundaries. I think now that it was wrong. I assumed an alias, I guess, because I didn’t want to stoop to their level, not realizing that I was stooping to their level.”

On Sept. 1, The New Republic concluded that it wasn’t such a gray area after all and terminated the “Lee Siegel on Culture” blog; in its place, an editor’s note apologized for Mr. Siegel’s deception and informed readers that Mr. Siegel had been suspended from writing for the magazine.

“The transcendent rules of journalism apply, even in the ‘Talkback’ section of the magazine,” Franklin Foer, The New Republic’s editor, said. “We don’t let our writers misrepresent themselves to readers.”

Mr. Foer said that Mr. Siegel’s suspension is “indefinite.”

Mr. Siegel is known as an increasingly rare breed—a combative intellectual generalist, whose omnipresence in print sometimes made it seem as if he was monopolizing the review columns at every media outlet in town. In addition to writing for The New Republic, where he was hired by the magazine’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, and has been on the masthead since 1998 (as a contributing writer, a contributing editor, a television critic and, most recently, as a senior editor), he was the art critic for Slate and a book critic at The Nation for a year. His own book, Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination, comes out this month, from Basic Books. He’s notorious for engaging in heated, sometimes hysterical arguments with detractors or those whose work he’s already trashed.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Mr. Siegel’s exposure as his own worst self-promoter set off ripples of horror and schadenfreude over Labor Day weekend. In some small corners of the literary-blog community, the reaction was practically giddy: “Well, I was pointing out to people that you obviously needed a long rest in some soothing and undemanding place, and now I am happy to see that you will have more free time, at least. For once you have got something that is well-earned,” Christopher Hitchens wrote to him in an e-mail, following up with a lengthy entry about Mr. Siegel and his comeuppance on Mr. Hitchens’ Web si