Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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To Do Journalism
[Read the article: The "fantastic job" Newsweek's Richard Wolffe claims he is doing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You have to make a living at it. Salaried reporters face the same sort of compromises as anyone does who takes his pay from someone else. Once upon a time, if you were lucky, you might have gone to work for someone who at least claimed allegiance to the principles of the fourth estate, but I suspect that more often than not you'd have found yourself working for someone who simply had a partisan dislike for the one chosen to be what Garrison Keillor now calls the current occupant.
Which brings us to our current predicament. The moving finger now having writ and moved on, today's media are now large enough to create an entire class of embedded sycophants, not to mention one or two Rupert Murdochs, whose agenda is something more like one ring to rule them all than comforting the afflicted.
It takes resources to report on anything below the glossy surface. Most of us -- those who can still stand to watch television or read the NYT, anyway -- have long since developed analytical skills similar to those of folks in the old Soviet Union, skills which begin in the acknowledgment that everything we see or read is a self-serving lie of one sort or other. (This is true of both the left and the right -- while I've always been morally certain that GWB was an irresponsible wastrel, I was also glad to see Dan Rather get his, even if it was the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy which handed it to him.) One inconvenient truth remains, however: knowing that someone is lying isn't the same thing as knowing what's actually going on.
Bloggers will never have, except in a few cases, the resources to be journalists. If you think of journalism as a funnel, with the narrow end pointed at us, what bloggers can do -- and have done, for the most part -- is to wrestle control of the narrow end from the Rupert Murdochs, and turn it back against them. We should think of ourselves as the vox populi, the largest Op-Ed page in the known universe. If, as the economics of the post-industrial age evolve, we can do more, so much the better. No matter what happens, though, the present situation is inherently unstable, and can't last.
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Apropos of Nothing, Nothing At All
[Read the article: The "fantastic job" Newsweek's Richard Wolffe claims he is doing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mona, quoting Mencken: A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
One such overgrown child said:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and rose are one.
Mencken would've had no idea what such twaddle meant, and is now beyond reach, but there's still hope for you, Mona. I give you this fire, and this rose. Mind the thorns.
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Surely You Can See
[Read the article: The "fantastic job" Newsweek's Richard Wolffe claims he is doing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Jeb, that I'm already smitten. Besides, In my experience, Mona can do her own smiting.
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Barbara Hollingsworth
[Read the article: The "fantastic job" Newsweek's Richard Wolffe claims he is doing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Barbara, it doesn't seem that you've been reading here for very long. We're very well aware who voted for what, and many of us have formed opinions of some of the Democrats you name which are far from complimentary, and have said so.
Furthermore, being opposed to the war in Iraq is hardly defending people who blow things up for a living. Have you read nothing of the history of the past five years? If anything is true, it's that your misbegotten wastrel in the White House has guaranteed people who blow things up for a living both the means and motive for doing so for years, perhaps even decades to come, including those who fly bombers for the U.S. Air Force and Navy.
Furthermore, anyone who doubts that GWB is a moron rather than a svengali is a little light in the loafers herself. No one here is in any doubt on that score. The would-be svengalis surrounding him are another matter; not as smart as they think they are by half, but full of the sort of evil energy that only an ideologue can muster. There were plenty of people in the CIA and elsewhere -- virtually everywhere, in fact -- who knew that Saddam didn't have a military pot to piss in after 1991, and told your boy so. He didn't listen.
You're wasting your time here. You should be off somewhere, helping save your allies in the Republican Party from the comeuppance which they so richly deserve.
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Well, Whaddaya Know.
[Read the article: The "fantastic job" Newsweek's Richard Wolffe claims he is doing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Jeb, it appears you're right. It's comforting to know though, that I wasn't the only one who saw the apparition before it went poof.
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Don't Blame Foucault
[Read the article: The "fantastic job" Newsweek's Richard Wolffe claims he is doing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Jojo, in my reading of him, Foucault was principally a phenomenologist, not a politician. It's possible to observe how a particular narrative modifies the reality we create as well as the one we perceive without recommending that we ignore everything else, much less that we consciously engage in narrative wars. Besides, sophistry as a concept is a lot older than either structuralism or post-modernism.
It doesn't matter that calling a spade a spade is as much an art as constructing a Christianist alternate reality for the ages; in the end the former will have a lot more utility than the latter.