2:51 PM Manny: "Memo to my remaining daily print colleagues and their nostalgia club: Get over it and get over yourselves. It’s not that the Internet is Mr. Wonderful. Much of it mimics the same bad qualities that drove the public away from daily newspapers. You lost the public to us because - there's no nice or sugar-coated way to say it - you guys really suck at what you do. In your arrogance, you established calcified “rules” of “journalism” and false “objectivity” that neutered and spayed all of your reporters, domesticated so they would never again afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted. When you took the honest advocacy out of reporting you emptied it of all passion and reason to exist. It was a nice ride on your profit ledger sheet during the recent decades when you turned your rags into propaganda arms for the wealthy and powerful, but a funny thing happened on the way to the ATM machine: You lost the trust of your readers, half of whom have already given you the finger and pursued alternate routes to inform themselves of current events. And the rest are on the way through the same EXIT sign." (From the below link...)
2:54 PM Me: Now that is a diatribe
Manny: Giordano's a pissed off dude though
kinda always
2:55 PM me: so are you
I like this: "I grew up reading a New York Times that no longer exists: Tom Wicker reporting from the Attica prison truthfully and in solidarity with the rebelling inmates, Max Frankel ordering expensive investigations into government wrongdoing, the publication of The Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, and I’ll never regret following music critic John Rockwell down Bleeker Street to The Bowery and through those graffiti-covered doors into the future that we inhabit today. "
I'm nostalgic for a time I never knew
Could you post this in the comments section of your blog? It wouldn't let me do so anonymously:
ReplyDeleteI wanted to respond to Manny's rant about newspapers:
Yeah, that’s great, but I’m in Afghanistan and I haven’t exactly tripped over anyone from TPM out here braving IED’s, kidnappings and malaria to tell the stories of the Afghan people or the NATO armies fighting the war.
I HAVE run into Dexter Filkins, Joao Silva, Mike Phillips and Anand Gopal—from The Times, Journal and Monitor respectively—risking their necks and editorial budgets to bring the war to readers. Check out C.J. Chivers work from the Korengal Valley for The Times. If that isn’t the best combat reporting in years, I’ll eat my Nikon. Chivers has also shown that U.S. weapons and ammo is leaking to the Taliban. I spoke to a colonel a few weeks ago who said those stories have led to a change in the way the Army handles munitions. The Times also broke the story of ill-equipped U.S. soldiers in Iraq, which led to a congressional inquiry.
Are you saying that war reporters go back to the days of Ernie Pyle? I love that guy too (and he was an advocate of the highest order) but reading him today, his stuff sounds like Army propaganda. People who welcome the decline of newspapers, rarely take into account the shrinking American foreign print press-corps. Without them, you’re left with CNN, Al Jazeera and SkyNews. I don’t count BBC, because they’re not Americans and they do as much print as anything else.
I’ve got problems with The Times too, but I think your throwing the baby out with the bathwater.