Typical Leo Laporte - Skin a Bit Thin?

Honestly, I don't know why I'm blogging about this. I shouldn't even waste my time, but it is so typical of Leo Laporte, egomaniac.

You'll need a bit of background. Several months ago, I blogged about the second crash of the TWiT user forums and remarked how Leo Laporte should have taken steps to back things up - knowing that there was a problem. In September, 2008, I called Leo out in the forum for not caring about his contributors enough to spend an hour or so to fix a bunch of on-going problems. Admittedly, my tone was more than a little heated (Leo called it "snide"). I apologized, but in a supposedly private conversation with another forum member, I commented that I was beginning to wonder if my monthly contribution was worth it.

Over the next few days, Leo kept up a string of personal attacks and nasty comments to me, and then revealed that anyone with administrator rights on the forum could see private posts. Frankly, I thought that was completely beyond the pale, and I quit the TWiT forums, cancelled my monthly contribution, and all my podcast subscriptions. Going cold turkey was actually quite easy - I missed the community, but the TWiT products had become so lackluster that I actually did myself a favor by not listening to them anymore.

I must admit, I did pop into the TWiT forums out of curiously a few times earlier this year, and I was a bit startled to find that in early March, Leo announced that he was closing the "contributor" forums, and moving everyone over to Leoville. Why? Because he couldn't stand reading all the nasty criticisms about his shows. (This wasn't the first time he did that - he closed the comments on the show pages when the criticism got too strong, too). I did find it ironic that for three years, there were dozens of threads of varying levels of nastiness about various guests and show regulars (Scott Bourne was a frequent target); however, Leo never stepped in to quell those. Only when the quality of the podcasts themselves were questioned, did Leo feel it necessary to pull the plug.

So, it brings me to this snippet from a TWiT Network live videocast - apparently a discussion of the new Palm Pre (I found this by way of Gruber's Daring Fireball). Michael Arrington called Leo out for not mentioning that he has a review unit. Arrington is certainly a NMDB* and his tone was certainly meant to irritate, but Leo's reaction is really not what a broadcasting professional would do. He's known and worked with Arrington before, and played right into it.

Call Arrington an ass - yes, but walk off the show in a fury - absolutely not.

Check it out:



NMDB - New Media Douche Bag