WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 29, 2012
Imitation of news: No one does it like Ashley Parker, the New York Times’ queen of all piffle.
The New York Times specializes in giving you piffle in the place of political news. Has anyone ever mastered the format quite the way Parker did in Monday morning’s piece?
Frankly, we’re not sure.
Parker’s piece makes empty calories look like a big bowl of oat bran. Be sure to note the utterly pointless photo, along with its hiss-spitting caption.
Parker is only 29. It’s hard to know how anyone gets to be so fatuous at such a young age. In this case, Parker got help from Michael Barbaro, whose screaming fatuity we will explore in more depth tomorrow.
We strongly recommend this brain-dead non-report report. When Katherine Boo discussed “creeping Dowdism,” we’ll guess this is what she meant.
This young woman is going to go far in contemporary journamalism if she keeps this up!
ReplyDeleteShe might even get her own column to misstate events and facts or create non-existant ones out of whole cloth, over and over.
Oh hell, let's just give her a column in the New York Times or Kaplan Test Prep University Washington Post, and put her on Fox News Channel and CNN and MSNBC and be done with it!
The web lackeys still need some work, though. Column headline doesn't match HTML title block...it says "Detroit Stadium Event Is Exception to Romney Precision". And if you "View Page Info" you see this: "Mitt Romney is counting on superior organization to win his party’s nomination, but a reputation for meticulousness can undercut as well as benefit a candidate." So I guess the big message is about how "unauthentic" Romney is because he's supposed to be meticulous yet look what happened. That's the narrative on Romney.
ReplyDeleteI watched Bill Moyers' interview with Neal Gabler last weekend, in which Gabler basically agreed with Bob that our democracy can't function this way. So it's not just Bob talking about this stuff.
Link to the Moyers-Gabler interview
DeleteBlame her editor(s) and the NYT for such pablum. Writing will meet whatever standard is set, or the writer will be replaced. It took years for journalism to fall to this level, and the schools continue to churn out more of the same. The NYT sees no reason to buck the tide.
ReplyDeleteWhen I want to give Bob a well-deserved stroke, I send him a Neal Gabler quote:
ReplyDeleteHere's a good one.
From Neal Gabler: And it is the liberal politicians who continue to pay the price for the liberal journalists' self-promotion cum self-preservation. Beating up on well-educated, well-spoken liberals is probably the surest means of proving one's Everyman credentials and protecting one's personal brand without also, by the way, losing one's Beltway bona fides. Going on about faith and religion is another.
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jun/29/opinion/op-gabler29
Enjoy, Bob.
"authentic"
ReplyDeletei do not believe that word means what she thinks it means.
hello
ReplyDelete