One of my personal regrets on this blog is that I feel the few posts I've made about Jeff Jarvis have been entirely too harsh.  Unfortunately, though I still regret that, this post is essentially par for that particular course.

But try to remember that I do think Mr. Jarvis is a nice enough guy, even if I find his opinions to be infuriatingly misguided. 

That said for those who don't know Jeff Jarvis is what I would call a "new media guru" in that he travels around giving speeches on how print media is dead and online media is the future.  A recent Slate article called Mr. Jarvis on the fact that he regularly insults those involved in print media while making these speeches.  Since then Mr. Jarvis has responded several times, every time angrily, but this quote is where I think he crosses the line...

I was gratified at the support of friends. But I was more bothered than anything that I got email from my parents wondering who this Ron Rosenbaum was (and why was he attacking their son). Even bloggers have mothers.

This isn’t about my publicness. It’s about the next person who hasn’t experienced this before and comes online to create or share and gets stabbed. What happens to her willingness to open up in public? If she reverts to her shell, what do we lose? What impact does this have on the quality of the conversation? What impact does that have on the reputation and value of the medium?

Right here Mr. Jarvis losses points with me for the tired "It's not about me it's about the next person" line.  Everyone knows that's just an excuse for people to whine about their own treatment while trying to look altruistic.  Anyway, we continue...

Online has developed one system to deal with attacks, and it came into play this week: Someone will remind the participants not to feed the trolls. Feeding the trolls not only encourages them but degrades the conversation and, again, devalues the medium. The trolls and their followers hurt the internet. So don’t feed them. Another system, also in play this week, kicks in when someone tries to get the discussion back on track to talk about the issues and ideas that are being ignored. One norm that has developed is that it’s proper etiquette to link to responses to an attack (note that Rosenbaum has not granted even that simple courtesy). Finally, there is humor.

So let me lay things out.  Jeff Jarvis has made a career of calling mainstream reporters fools, idiots, and any number of other derogatory things.  But when one reporter calls him out he declares that person a troll and paints himself as the hapless victim.

I'm sorry but I just don't think so.

Keep in mind the Slate writer actually dealt with Mr. Jarvis far more fairly than Mr. Jarvis deals with others.  Here's what I would consider the harshest criticism from the Slate article...

But something has changed in the last year or two: He's now visibly running for New Media Pontificator in Chief. He began treating his own thoughts as profound and epigrammatic, PowerPoint-paradoxical, new-media-mystical. He acquired the habit of proclaiming "Jarvis' Laws" of new media, acting like a prophet, a John the Baptist if not the messiah. (Although he knows who the messiah is. He's about to publish a book of Google worship—What Would Google Do?—that makes that clear.)

Now compare that to the Jeff Jarvis quote above.  It's pretty clear that Mr. Jarvis will "dish it out" to his heart's content but refuses to take anything even close to it in return.

Beyond that the Slate writer actually did have a fairly valid point which is that Mr. Jarvis, while claiming to be open to a conversation on where media is going, seems to regard everyone on the other end of that conversation as an idiot for no other reason than they disagree with him. 

The bottom line here is that Mr. Jarvis shows no respect for those who disagree with him but demands not only respect but downright reverence in return.  Anyone who dares to question that gets branded as a troll.  Not very classy imho.