Similarly, when someone experiences a negative consequence of something they posted on the internets I don't really understand why many people feel the need to preface every comment on that situation with "people should KNOW they can get in trouble for what they post on the inernet." Well, duhh. We mostly know this though sometimes people are more unaware of than others. It's useful to occasionally remind people that they should think twice before doing something on the internet that can be easily linked to their real life. But, still, sometimes some of us don't follow that advice or make the "mistake" of actually telling someone we know about our blog or our politics or our religion or anything else. And, when that happens, people are sure to point out that it's stupid to tell your bosses anything about your personal life because OF COURSE that will only get you in trouble, etc.
Look, the fact that something opens you up to asshole treatment by assholes doesn't excuse the asshole behavior anymore than having a few drinks at a meat market bar late at night excuses the behavior of a rapist. A victim is a victim, no matter how "stupid" we might imagine their "risky" behavior was. I'm glad none of us except actual victims ever do anything stupid.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that in l'affaire Olen, the actions of the nanny in question are essentially irrelevant, except to the extent that it allows you to pat yourself on the back for not have ever been so stupid yourself. Whatever.
In addition, the fact that the nanny in question got fired is also almost entirely irrelevant. It may or may not reflect badly on the parents who hired her, but the nanny decision is a parenting decision. No matter how silly the decision sounds I'm not going to question the right of parents to choose who they want to spend significant time with their own kids.
The issue here is that the former employer decided to turn this incident into a piece for the New York Times, and that the Times thought it worthy of being published. It's that the Times allowed a woman who was upset that her nanny would dare to have a life and dare to very rarely reference her employment to call the nanny a drunken slut for a national audience. It's that the Times took a private individual and made her life public, over her protestations, for its readers without any justifiable news angle. It's that it's somehow acceptable for an employer to talk shit about an employee in a national newspaper but not okay for an employee to briefly mention her personal employment on her weblog. The Times decision to publish this story legitimized the view that not only was she within her rights to fire her (surely true) but that she had the additional privilege of talking trash about her in a respectable national newspaper.
Most people have a reasonable expectation that they won't suddenly find their personal details splashed across a national newspaper's pages. I say "reasonable expectation" because it does require that people involved in making the decision about what is a legitimate news story, and thus a legitimate reason to bring someone into the spotlight, are in fact reasonable. Clearly Olen and the editors at the Times are not. The power to do something is not a sufficient justification for that action.
...Lance says it very briefly:
But Olen, who didn't like it that the nanny was exposing the Olens' personal lives on the web, thought it was fine for her to expose the nanny's personal life in the New York Times. This in itself was the act of a bully. But it was also the act of a person with very little self-awareness, because the portrait she paints of hersef is far worse than the sketch the nanny drew on her blog.