Media

Sneering from atop the New Yorker

by Dan Kennedy

To be sure, the Bible Belters who've started a movement to bring back prayer at high-school football games are misguided zealots. But they deserve better than to be sneeringly dismissed as ignorant rustics in the pages of the New Yorker.

More to the point, the New Yorker's readers deserve better. Staff writer Mark Singer's piece, in the September 25 issue, is described as the return of an old New Yorker feature called "U.S. Journal," which was begun by Calvin Trillin in 1967. The trouble is, Singer lacks Trillin's humanity and empathy, choosing to pander to his readers' predilections rather than challenging them. Take, for example, this characteristic passage: "A parade of preachers with variegated homiletic styles provided the main entertainment: old-style mountain gibbering, tearful warbling, take-no-prisoners fear-mongering." Tee-hee!

Singer could have offered some genuine insight into these well-intentioned folks who find themselves (fortunately for the rest of us) on the wrong side of the culture war. Instead, he cranked out an elitist, contemptuous putdown that would not be out of place in, say, the Onion or the Harvard Lampoon, but that is beneath the standards of the self-styled greatest magazine in America.

Singer's piece is especially jarring given that it is followed by Alex Kotlowitz's article on a small-town newspaper reporter who helped bring down a corrupt sheriff. Kotlowitz imbues David Silverberg -- a modest sort who's far more comfortable covering county board meetings than challenging officialdom -- with real dignity. That's precisely what Singer denied his victims. Wrong and wrongheaded though they may be, they deserved to be explained, not caricatured.