On Monday, Friedman wrote a column headlined “CNN’s Lou Dobbs for President, I say!” that seems to be an attempt to be funny (though he’s never shown the chops to be able to pull that off), but also exhibits his most consistent flaw: his tendency to ramble. The piece doesn’t really go anywhere, but, like a stalled cold front, just seems to hover around the area for a while before deciding to call it quits and burn itself out. Like other Friedman pieces, we don’t learn anything new about Dobbs other than he works for CNN and seems to be inching toward some form of advocacy journalism, but that’s as far as Friedman’s imagination will take him.


Roaming around inside your own head rarely makes for good journalism (Andy Rooney and Clyde Haberman come to mind), and it makes even worse media criticism. But Friedman doesn’t necessarily seem to practice media criticism as we’ve come to understand it. Instead, he fumbles over a wide range of media issues with little destination in sight and with few examples to back up what he’s trying to say. At best, he needs an editor to clean up his goofy, at times embarrassing, prose (example from the Lou Dobbs piece: “Understand, this was an issue close to Dobbs’ heart — and mind, not to mention his liver, gallbladder and spleen. You see, Dobbs puts his entire being into a cause when he gets his mojo going”), and at worst Marketwatch needs to cut his writing schedule down from three pieces a week to two, or even better, one. He — and, for that matter, most columnists — just isn’t up to the task of churning out three reported, reasoned columns a week.


In the meantime, we’ll keep reading, and cringing.

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