Last week, DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin launched a new running feature called #ApologyWatch, with which Sorkin and co-apology-watcher Dov Seidman plan to monitor and comment on the “apology theater” of corporate America. First up: Andrew Ross Sorkin and Dov Seidman!

It turns out that two professional writers, Susan McCarthy and Marjorie Ingall, own a blog (which inspired an associated hashtag) called SorryWatch, which...also monitors and comments on the apology theater of corporate America. (The blog was founded in 2012.) The pair quickly asked Sorkin and Seidman to acknowledge their original work and publicly apologize for not crediting SorryWatch in the first place.

Both men refused the offer. Instead they praised SorryWatch for its “contribution to the dialogue.” Sorkin told Gawker that DealBook was “delighted to discover others who are passionate about this topic.” (His editor, Dan Niemi, supplied a nearly identical statement to McCarthy and Ingall.) Seidman invited the women to “connect and explore.”

To be fair, Sorkin and Seidman launched #ApologyWatch to express the notion that everybody apologizes too quickly, and too insincerely, so this isn’t a moment of hypocrisy, exactly; just barely-masked condescension. Indeed, the men would have violated their venture’s core premise if either uttered a single apologetic word. Seidman, Sorkin writes,

has become so troubled — and offended — by the ease with which apologies seem to roll off the tongues of our leaders that he called for an “apology cease-fire” in front of several dozen chief executives and politicians at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

(Gawker apologizes for quoting the paragraph above.)

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