Winners: Peter Kaplan, legendary editor of the New York Observer, who announced yesterday that he would step down this summer after fifteen years in the post, and David Carr, who wrote a characteristically smart, stylish and sophisticated account of Kaplan’s career in this morning’s New York Times. Kaplan was responsible for scores of New York scoops, and he ignited the careers of more talented young journalists from the Observer’s launching pad than any other member of his generation. Kaplan also gets credit for inventing Full Court Press, because he was the first person to suggest that I should write it.
Of Kaplan, Carr wrote:
Known for his soaring soliloquies about the city he loved but did not live in — he resides in Westchester — Mr. Kaplan is a modern version of the fedora-wearing newsman, a man who saw his paper as a weekly libretto rendered in glamour and noir. During his tenure the longest for an editor in the newspaper’s 22-year history, The Observer played large for its size, catching Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., when he was a presidential candidate, taking the measure of Barack Obama by saying he was “articulate and bright and clean”; getting an interview with Jayson Blair at a time when his reporting for The New York Times was coming apart; and all but creating a television and movie franchise with its “Sex and the City” column.
Winner: C.J. Chivers, for a chilling battlefield account from Afghanistan, whose details suggest the gigantic task our new president has embarked upon—and how much it already resembles the quagmire of Vietnam.
Sinner: Peggy Noonan, for making the most inane remarks about the release of the Bush administration torture memos on any Sunday chat show (oh, such a high bar): “Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need to just keep walking. … It’s hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much good will come of that.”
Winner: Democratic senator Russ Feingold, for taking Noonan to task: “I frankly have never heard anything quite as disturbing as her remark that was something to the effect of: ‘well sometimes you just have to move on.’”
Winner: David Barstow of The New York Times, who was awarded a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize last week for his blockbuster investigation of a huge Pentagon propaganda scandal, in which retired military officers alternated between spouting the Bush administration line on all of the major TV networks and collecting inside information for the military contractors who employed them so they could get more contracts connected to the war. Presented as objective experts on CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, these men actually work with “more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants” which are “all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.”
Sinners: CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and MSNBC, who not only did absolutely nothing to reform this corrupt system—they never even reported Barstow’s accusations, or, this week, the fact that Barstow had won a Pulitzer Prize for this work. For a typically thorough rundown of this outrageous behavior by every major commercial broadcaster in America, see Glenn Greenwald’s excellent account.
Winners: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who during the past week have been even more indispensable than usual.
For the definitive takedown of Messrs. Cheney and Rove, don’t miss Stewart on “Balzheimers Disease.”
And for the funniest five minutes and fifty seconds of television in recent memory, see Colbert’s demolition of the anti-marriage equality movement. It starts at 3 minutes and 50 seconds into the episode.
How about a sinner for Rachel Maddow spending a week making tea bag puns and talking down to tea-partiers? (See The Daily Howler) She should use it as a teachable moment instead of bringing Ana Marie Cox on to make ridiculous sex puns.
#1 Posted by Some Guy, CJR on Thu 23 Apr 2009 at 07:48 PM
Literally the ONLY place I have heard or read about the difference between the actual goals of SERE training and the bizarre reengineering of it for torture training is on The Rachel Maddow show. This is appalling.
#2 Posted by Sarah Burke, CJR on Fri 24 Apr 2009 at 08:12 AM
If there is a more predictable and mechanical writer in the CJR stable than this Kaiser, I haven't seen him or her - even Trudy Leiberman is not quite as politically dogmatic under the phony guise of 'journalistic' critiques. If Kaiser really hates people who question conventional (i.e., 1968-vintage) urban liberal ideology as much as he robotically seems to, he has a fabulous weapon at his disposal. He can actually write a 'Winners and Sinners' column that concedes that sometimes liberals are wrong and conservatives are right - it is a complex world - and his conservative opponents will drop dead in amazement at such a concession. Of course, the liberals might die of blogger apoplexy, too, so there is that risk.
As it is, I could write this guy's hackwork myself - easily. I'll do it for half the price. How about it, CJR?
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Fri 24 Apr 2009 at 03:08 PM
And yet, Mark, just four days ago, Kaiser devoted an entire blog to an attack on....the Obama administration: http://www.cjr.org/full_court_press/above_the_fold_stuck_in_the_lo.php.
I guess that's the one you think you could have written yourself.
Careful readers like you give the right the reputation it so richly deserves. And I used to think you were such a cool guy!
#4 Posted by Rick Whitaker, CJR on Sat 25 Apr 2009 at 11:23 AM
Was the attack in 'Winners and Sinners'? That's all I read by Kaiser, and I specifically name-checked it. It is true that a number of people on the Left are protecting Obama's flank by attacking him for insufficient devotion to the ideology of the generic Mother Jones reader. Bush was sometimes attacked from his Right, too. If Kaiser has ever conceded in 'Winners and Sinners' that a left-wing point of view, for example the notorious coverage of the Duke-Lacrosse case by the NY Times, has resulted in poor coverage, or noted that journalism which appears to support a GOP talking point may turn out to be correct, I haven't seen it.
#5 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Mon 27 Apr 2009 at 01:54 PM
I was not yet blogging about the press when the New York Times was writing about the Duke-Lacrosse case. If I had been, I certainly would have excoriated their coverage.
It was reprehensible.
#6 Posted by Charles Kaiser, CJR on Wed 29 Apr 2009 at 05:58 PM
To Charles Kaiser:
Point taken, and thanks for reading. I'm glad you agree that the Times' coverage of the case was reprehensible, though I suspect you may be reluctant to concede that it may be a metaphor for the Times' generally worthless and untrustworthy journalism on any issue bearing on 'identity' politics - which covers a lot of ground in American politics. Anyway, my respect-level just went up a degree.
However, I think my advice is sound - 'Winners and Sinners' is predictably partisan, and holds no interest for readers who don't share the rather urban-stereotypical viewpoint. There is not that much qualitative difference between your column and, say, that of Brent Bozell. The difference is that Brent Bozell is not featured by CJR, which professes to be primarily a journalism review rather than a political pulpit.
#7 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Thu 30 Apr 2009 at 01:15 PM