The death of New York Times media critic David Carr has been greeted with a universal outpouring of affection and grief for a man who “was sometimes blunt, almost always
searingly honest,” in the words of Times executive editor Dean Baquet. I guess I don’t entirely agree.
None of the articles I read about Carr mentioned the fact that he had been looking skeletal at least since 2013. (According to the official diagnosis, he died of lung cancer.) This is in keeping with the tradition of the American media that a public figure’s health is none of the public’s business. Thus, Carr’s death is described as coming as a complete
surprise, even though the effects of his illness were obvious years in advance.
I would also like to point out that one of Carr’s last pieces, on l’affaire Brian Williams, scarcely complied with his demand, given elsewhere, that “Journalists are responsible for following the truth wherever it may guide them.”
Writing before NBC suspended Williams for six months, Carr argues, reasonably enough, that the “muddled” apology Williams first offered for his deceit isn’t enough, and only a “full-throated, unmodulated apology will do.” But then Carr begins veering off in the weeds:
Those of us who worked the Hurricane Katrina coverage rolled our eyes at some of the stories Mr. Williams told of the mayhem there, but it was a dark, confusing place and a lot of bad things happened, so who were we to judge?
Excuse me? It’s okay to lie if it’s, you know, dark? That’s setting the bar pretty
goddamn low, considering the whoppers that Brian came up with, claiming that
his hotel (the Ritz-Carlton) was overrun with gangs, that he contacted dysentery, that he had nothing to eat, etc., etc., etc., all of which were contradicted by people on the scene, and none of which Williams made during his on-site reporting from New Orleans.
Carr follows this up with some rambling about the unreliability of memory and the fog of war and then. shifting way too comfortably into the editorial we, serves up this caramel-coated creampuff of a conclusion.
We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it. That’s why, when the forces of man or Mother Nature whip up
chaos, both broadcast and cable news outlets are compelled to ship the whole
heaving apparatus to far-flung parts of the globe, with an anchor as the flag
bearer.We want our anchors to be everywhere, to be impossibly famous, globe-trotting, hilarious, down-to-earth, and above all, trustworthy. It’s a job description that no one
can match.
Sorry, Dave, but I don’t want any of this. Entirely missing from this discussion is the recognition that these days the nightly news is not journalism, if that word is to have any meaning at all. It’s four minutes of “controversy” followed by twenty minutes of feel-good treacle. Brian Williams concocted a feel-good non-event publicizing his own
fake heroism and covered his own self-promoting deceit as “news” for the American people. You may have felt that that was worth $10 million a year, but I don’t.
Afterwords
The real reason Carr wanted to give Williams a pass on all of this, of course, is that
Carr recognized Williams as a brother. “There but for the grace of God go I” is
the subtext for all of this. It may be generous, but it isn’t journalism. Or,
rather, it isn’t journalism, but it’s very much what passes for such.
