Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
BACKFIRES AND EXPLOSIONS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES AS A POSSIBLE FUTURE CHIEF RE-INVENTS THE PAPER’S OPINION PAGES
By Joe Pompeo @ The Hive @ VanityFair.com, Feb. 26
A yoga-pants refusenik, a climate-science skeptic, and a tech writer with a neo-Nazi pal, among other offenders, have put James Bennet in the crosshairs.
I've lost the capacity to gauge the opprobrium—what’s irrational versus what’s a reasonable amount of Internet outrage these days,” said James Bennet, editorial-page editor of The New York Times, and someone talked about as a future contender for the Times’s top newsroom job. “Look,” he went on, “we’re recruiting different types of writers than we have traditionally, and I’ll make some mistakes. It’s just gonna happen.”
It was early Thursday afternoon, February 22, and Bennet had just finished the second in a trio of internal town-hall meetings that he was hosting to quell brewing discontent over the Opinion section. The previous week, Bennet had announced the hiring of a new Opinion writer and member of the editorial board, Quinn Norton, a tech journalist with a distinctly un-Timesian background. Norton was a provocative recruit, the kind that Bennet had been brought on board to make. But as frequently happens in the current combustible era, the provocation produced epic blowback [.....]
Comments
From the linked article “We’ve also seen Bret Stephens write a column about repealing the Second Amendment,” said Sulzberger.
Sulzberger said that in defense of the hire of the right wing columnist. See how eclectic his views are. He's not a traditional conservative. He'll even come out for repealing the Second Amendment. That's not how I read the article. The claim was there were no gun control laws that could stop mass shootings that would pass constitutional muster therefore we should repeal the Second Amendment. I don't believe that's true and he didn't make a good case it was true. There's much we could do to control guns that have passed the constitutional standard in the past and likely would in the future.
Imo the purpose of the article is to stake out a position so extreme that every conservative, moderate, and even the vast majority of liberals would reject it. Hoping that the conclusion reached would be since we can't and don't want to repeal the Second Amendment and nothing less is worth doing we might as well do nothing on gun control at all. All based on the fraudulent argument that reasonable gun control laws that would have a significant effect on gun violence are all unconstitutional.
My problem with conservative writers like Stephens isn't that I disagree with their conservative views but that his arguments to support those views aren't up to the standard I expect from the paper of record. The New York Times.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 1:50am
I haven't even been checking out a lot of the newbies.Judging from the article, I think the critics are right that they've been cluelessly hiring lots of, for want of a better word: bimbos (of both sexes.) On the other hand, I don't know millennial tastes. And that's what they have to go after to keep paying the electric bill. One thing I know: everyone complains about talking heads and op-ed and pundits instead of facts, but from tending to a news junkie addiction for a decade now, what I have seen is that those are always the articles with the highest clicks, for all media, op-ed is where the money is. (And that was fed with the growth of blogging, we all contributed to it.) It has only gotten worse with social media, people share their favorite pundit's latest on Facebook or whatever and the numbers zoom.
I totally agree that we desperately need some outlets to maintain some old-fashioned standards! My ears perked up and I was heartened when I heard one of the Parkland kids talking to Anderson Cooper last night mentioned Walter Cronkite, as in "we need more Walter Cronkite type news" to counter NRA spin. That he even knew the name was amazing. He had clearly learned the difference, none of this "everybody curates their own narrative." I suspect, from seeing enough of them now, that Parkland was just an exceptionally excellent school with great teachers and curricula. Not getting my hopes up on that front....
by artappraiser on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 2:36am
I suspect, from seeing enough of them now, that Parkland was just an exceptionally excellent school with great teachers and curricula. Not getting my hopes up on that front....
Though curricula varies greatly, much to many a Democrat's chagrin, you should indeed be getting your hopes up. The amazing Parkland students aren't outliers (if they were, and if you thought so, would you so often declare Millennials the hope for our country?), they've been thrust into the spotlight in an horrific way yet they represent what's been there all along: smart and informed kids.
Back to the point of the article ... seems to me the NYT is not just looking for clicks; they're looking for a variety of them. Perhaps the reputation for being a "liberal" paper has become too tight a fit. Whether that works for them, if that's the plan, remains to be seen.
by barefooted on Wed, 02/28/2018 - 3:36am