So it seems that New Yorker film critic David Denby has officially gone off the deep end. His book Snark has opened to nearly universallynegative reviews, and it spent an extended amount of time crticizing Gawker Media blogs past and present, especially Wonkette. After actually reading the book, Wonkette discovered a number of blatant errors that could have been easily checked, including confusing the gender of a Wonkette poster when talking about female jealousy of Chelsea Clintion (the post was written by Jim Newell), and saying a snarky Wonkette post about Ted Kennedy from October 2007 was the blog's response to Kennedy's cancer announcement in June 2008 (Wonkette posted a solemn entry at that time).

On NPR this afternoon, a caller confronted Denby about those errors, Denby responded likewise:

I called into “Think” on KERA in Dallas to defend your honor. I called Denby out on his lack of fact checking. His new position is that it’s okay to say a woman wrote the Chelsea blog because, according to him, most of the commenters on Wonkette *are* women. He also acknowledged on his own (!) that the bottle-in-neck post was pre-tumor, but said that because you linked to the bottle post on your tumor post, Wonkette is vicious and mean, and gave his “what kind of minds would do that” line.

In addition to the pretty blatant sexism in his assumptions about Wonkette writers/commenters, he also made yet another factual error by claiming Wonkette was still owned by Gawker Media, when, in fact, Wonkette was spun off from Gawker in April.

The ‘Wonkette Part’ Of David Denby’s Book Really Just A Bunch Of Major, If Not Libelous, Errors

Wonkette Caller Grills David Denby