UPDATED BELOW: (Saturday) Having had a somewhat longer commute than usual the past few weeks, I have once again become a daily New York Times reader, often to my considerable chagrin. For the last 15 years or so, as my local newspaper, the Oregonian, got thinner and thinner, I readily coughed up the extra [...]
With my customary Sunday morning dread, I leafed past the letters in the NYT Magazine, knowing that just a page or two away, a Deborah Solomon “interview” with some thug, criminal, or charlatan would, as usual, be another head-slapping missed opportunity, wherein the creep in question would fool Solomon again, and in the journalistic equivalent [...]
Reading the New York Times with unusual thoroughness over the holiday weekend, I found myself annoyed, and a little embarrassed, that so much of it was, well, garbage. Worse, it was garbage of the most common and insulting sort: fawning, shallow interviews, dubious, poorly-sourced claims presented as fact, “balance” in the form of risibly false [...]