BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Thursday, December 16, 2004
WHAT A DOLT. I imagine it would
take a while to amass enough rejection letters from the op-ed page of
a major daily newspaper to be able to get a funny column out of it.
Bruce Stockler didn't want to wait. So he managed to sweet-talk
National Review Online into posting his piece on rejections from the
Washington Post without bothering to have actually been, you
know, rejected.
Howard Kurtz has the details
here.
Read that first, and pay careful attention to the words of
National Review editor Rich Lowry, who tells Kurtz, "This
piece seems to me to be pretty obvious satire. It seems to me he's
obviously making stuff up to be funny." Lowry does concede that the
satire, if that's what it is, is more apparent by the end of
Stockler's piece than at the beginning. But Lowry makes a serious
factual error in calling Stockler's column "funny."
Then, if you care enough to
continue, read
Stockler. Act quickly! I
wouldn't bet a lot of money that it will remain online the rest of
the day. If you're like me, I think you'll agree that Stockler is
nothing but a lying liar. (Via Romenesko.)
BRUDNOY'S LAST COLUMN. Among
many other things, David Brudnoy was a film critic for the Community
Newspaper chain. This week, CNC publishes his
final piece - a heartfelt
plea for AIDS research, especially in the Third World. There's more
Brudnoy here.
In the new Phoenix, Harvey
Silverglate has a terrific
tribute to his
friend.
NEW IN THIS WEEK'S
PHOENIX. Jack Beatty, of the Atlantic
Monthly and the radio show On Point, talks about the
great
political writing that's
between the covers of a recent book that he edited,
Pols.
posted at 8:58 AM |
2 comments
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link
2 Comments:
Oh, chill out, Dan. Stockler's piece is at least *mildly* funny. True, the first couple of paragraphs are deadpan but after that it pretty clearly becomes self-satire. It might even function as a bit of a dig at paranoid right-wing critics of the 'liberal media', initially sucked in by the piece's verisimilitude before belatedly realizing that the conspiracy is all the writer's own head.
Stockler responds to the mini-tempest today: see
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stockler200412161007.asp
Kind of hard to debate humor, but I didn't find Stockler's piece particularly interesting or amusing, and I say that as an NRO subscriber. I'm also surprised that NRO ran the piece even though its editors and contributors have frequently complained about how many readers fail to recognize even the most blatant forms of parody/satire.
Even so, for WaPo to get worked up about it is pretty strange. Journalistic resources not well spent, that's for sure.
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
