Angels Fan Site Fires Editor- Where's the Accountability?

Late last night, SB Nation's Angels fan site, Halos Heaven, had a post up in which the author, known as "Rev Halofan", took to blasting Josh Hamilton in the most unprofessional way I can recall reading anyone blasting a professional athlete. The post has since been taken down, but a transcript/screenshot can be found here, if you didn't get a chance to catch it. Of note:

“I can only hope that when you do yourself in, which you will, that, mercifully, like (Steve) How, you take nobody else with you.

Good bye Josh, today is the first day of the rest of your life and you used it to announce to the world that nothing will ever be your fault. Happy snorting.”

There's anger and resentment, then there's something else entirely. This piece fell into the latter category. For their part, SB Nation took the piece down and has released a statement in which they have apologized for the content and announced that they have relieved "Rev Halofan" of his duties.

On one front, there are those that are criticizing the very nature of blogging in general, that perhaps it provides too many liberties that a mainstream media outlet might not have. On another, we've seen plenty of "mainstream" media members make fools of themselves from time to time.

To me -- and this is just my opinion -- the fact that a site with so much traffic allows authors to go by nicknames instead of their real name just rubs me the wrong way. It's not something I feel terribly strong about, but in my mind, if you're someone that wants to write content of this nature, at least have the courage to put your name on it. To be clear, I'm not saying that the author's real name should be released now, after the fact, but it'd certainly be nice to see something more than a nickname publishing content for a large media company.

That may be oversimplifying it a bit, but it's honestly the first thing that jumps to mind. For all we know, "Rev Halofan" could come back to the site under some other name, and we'll never know it. We'll never know if he ends up writing for another outlet, and there will never be a real name attached to the immature hate and ignorance that was spewed on a platform that gets enough readership for this incident to end up on Deadspin. For a piece that was targeted toward Josh Hamilton's accountability, there's no real accountability when write under nicknames, and to me, that's a very real problem.