Letters to the Editor
bystander
Published Letters: 1348
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A Confederacy of Dunces?
[Read the article: The Chicago Tribune vs. Time magazine]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Pulitzer or not, maybe Bush identifies with the major character.
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. [...] But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor.
-Amazon.com review<-blockquote>
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Interesting day for journalism/journalists
[Read the article: The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Interesting day for journalism/journalists
Via Kevin Drum, a link to CampusProgress.org [http://tinyurl.com/ypmhwk] for Justin Elliott's interview of Matt Taibbi:
Seymour Hersh is the guy I really, really admire. I met him last year for the first time—I had to interview him for Rolling Stone and I was really nervous about it because I was told that he was this famously irascible character. [...] He’s old school. He’s the kind of guy who sits and pores over the newsletters of all these minor government agencies to see who retired that week so he can approach that person to see if he’s got any stories to tell on his way out of service. There are a few guys like that who are still out there, but they’re all holdovers from a lost age.
Embedded therein, a link to a Matt Taibbi column for the NewYorkPress entitled Shoveling Coal for Satan [http://tinyurl.com/2z7ddw]. The column is about Christopher Hitchens writing for Slate about Michael Moore. But Matt generalizes:
All journalists are cowards. Hitchens knows it, I know it, everybody in this business knows it. If there were any justice at all, every last goddamn one of us would be lowered, head-first, into a wood-chipper. Over Arizona. Shoot a nice red mist over the whole state, make it arable for a year or two. A year's worth of fava beans and endive for the children of Bangladesh: I dare anyone in our business to say that that wouldn't represent a better use of our rotting bodies than the actual fruits of our labor.
...What Hitchens calls courage is really a willingness to offend one's intellectual constituency, and what he really means by that is honesty—something very different from courage. It's a nice quality, honesty, and the pundit out there who has it and still manages to make a living is, I guess, to be applauded. But again, let's not confuse that with courage [...] Courage is a willingness to face real risks—your neck, or at the very least, your job. The journalist with courage would have threatened to resign rather than repeat George Bush's justifications for invasion before it began.
I'm off on this tangent because I'm enraged by the numerous attempts at verbose, pseudoliterary, "nuanced" criticism of Moore this week by the learned priests of our business. (And no, I'm not overlooking this newspaper.) Michael Moore may be an ass, and impossible to like as a public figure, and a little loose with the facts, and greedy, and a shameless panderer. But [Moore] wouldn't be necessary if even one percent of the rest of us had any balls at all.
If even one reporter had stood up during a pre-Iraq Bush press conference last year and shouted, "Bullshit!" it might have made a difference.[emphasis mine]
My cut and paste is a bloody hack job. As they say, read the whole thing.
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thomas c
[Read the article: The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks for capturing my gut feeling with such clarity. I believe you are spot-on.
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Jeebus, Jason G.
[Read the article: The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Deep breath. I don't read Glenn as defending Giuliani, or acting as a Giuliani apologist. Glenn *is* trying (valiantly, IMHO) to draw a distinction among objective, honest, courageous reporting and the scurrilous gossip that travels teh intertoobes out of which some edjit reporter tries to craft a story to show how [un]balanced they are. Your argument that Glenn is a Giuliani apologist makes about as much sense as those folks who want to conflate Glenn with all of Salon. Should Glenn decide to attack Giuliani (as opposed to using him as an object lesson) there's plenty of material for him to use. Consider it a division of labor. For all things ridiculous about Giuliani's bid for the presidency, most of us already know that Josh Marshall is *all over it.*
And were you to stick your head over at TalkingPointsMemo, you might learn this:
A man has taken two campaign staffers hostage at a Hillary Clinton office in New Hampshire, police say. Witnesses say a man walked into the office with a bomb taped to his chest. Clinton is not there.
Which, I could point out is one of the profound hazards of an environment made toxic by the noxious rhetoric of some of our press and some of the blogosphere. Give me Glenn's reasoned, discriminating voice, anytime!
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I'm sorry, Glenn
[Read the article: The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I didn't mean to overlook your piece about Giuliani's messianic psychopathy. You are correct. You've been as on top of it, as Josh; just differently. I happened to think of Josh as he's taken a very fine tooth comb over every inch of teh America's Amoral Mayor. I shot from the [l]ip, but didn't intended to slight. [insert sheepish grin here] I was straddling your site and Josh's when I saw Jason's comment. I plead temporarily scrambled brain circuitry :-/
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wisdom
[Read the article: The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think that sawing at the legs in the meanwhile is an honorable enterprise, although helping herd people away from the scene when the table starts to collapse may prove even more honorable in the end.
One of the many reasons I enjoy your comments William Timberman.
Thanks for this.
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I (heart) Helen Thomas
[Read the article: The NYT's Michael Cooper demonstrates what real reporting is]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There's a fun bit of transcript up at Crooks and Liars. I'll take my encouragement wherever I can find it.
http://tinyurl.com/374hac