Samantha Henig at Columbia Journalism Review Daily chided copycat journalism in The New York Times series on "Class In America" and curiously similar Wall Street Journal version. Then she added this cranky comment about my own piece in the latter paper:
"Reynolds' critique is worth reading," she writes, "simply for the fact that it's so cranky. . . But Reynolds' contention begs a point, perhaps because he did not include the Los Angeles Times in his jeremiad: If the issue is so agenda-driven, why is the Los Angeles paper the only one of the three that comes close to putting forward an actual agenda?"
My cranky answer appears on the CJR's blog, which may be a fun place to stir things up a bit.
Perhaps this is my own eccentric observation, but I always find that being cranky has one great advantage - it says that you're not a crank!
ReplyDeleteCranks are relentlessly shrill. It is only the normal, the healthy, those comfortable in rationality, that get cranky when the world is askew.
I think the real problem is that journalists, quite frequently, don't know anything other than popular wisdom, which is frequently wrong. Media outlets would do far better to hire people with advanced degrees who happen to write well.
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