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Sunday, August 11, 2024

"...disinclined to listen to media professors...."

I tend not to see eye to eye with my friend and co-blogger Howard on press issues, perhaps because we went to competing journalism schools, both of which, as journalism programs go, are very fine. (Mine was better. At least it used to be. Now that it offers master's degrees and doctorates instead of overpriced but excellent meat-and-potatoes training, it may be much worse.) That's okay! Marketplace of ideas and all that. But because he recently cited Jay Rosen, a non-journalist press critic who has had the misfortune to become a popular online commentator (online popularity being a recipe for ego and hubris), I thought I would share this recent Substack piece, by Mike Pesca, an actual journalist. Examining recent events, the piece quite rightly argues that Rosen is--once again--wrong in his position on how the press should cover the election and specifically former president Trump's candidacy, and likely to remain wrong by retaining and repeating the same mistaken position, no matter the evidence and without much sign of the capacity to acknowledge errors or reexamine his positions. Pesca also notes the endless wrongness of Margaret Sullivan, formerly a high-ranking journalist before becoming the last and worst of the New York Times's public editors; she has since enjoyed sinecures at the Washington Post and the Guardian and also, alas, teaches at my alma mater journalism school. 

Press criticism can be a valuable and necessary thing. (Among other things, it is useful in contextualizing the increasingly negative view the Supreme Court may hold of the press and why there may be actual reasons that its members, along with large numbers of the public, are more likely today than in past years to view it "in a negative light.") On the other hand, as Thor would say, as press critics Rosen and Sullivan are just the worst. (Tom Nichols, also mentioned by Wasserman, has been an interesting writer from time to time but is not much better.) As Pesca notes, most sensible working journalists will simply ignore them--Rosen because he's wrong and not a journalist and Sullivan because, well, because she's awful. This is an excellent approach for non-journalists as well. 

Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 11, 2024 at 06:02 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink

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