fun back and forth with the columbia journalism review regarding their crappy article by David Greenberg, ably destroyed by Bob Somersby at the daily howler.

first my post to them, then their reply. enjoy.



On Fri, 5 Sep 2003 rgreen@mediaventures.com wrote:

> i would assume, after reading www.dailyhowler.com
> 's quite vicious and entirely accurate
> take down of Mr. Greenberg's article regarding lies and journalism,
> that you might either want to a) issue a retraction (given the
> vacuousness and inaccuracy of greenberg's work) or b) hang your heads
> in shame. either way, a sad day for journalism when even CJR can't
> come within 100 miles of intelligent analysis of the most important
> issue of our day.
>
> i am both a creator and consumer of media, and i have finally managed
> to start reading articles as mendacious and absurd as greenberg's (and
> i will not bother to enumerate the list of mistakes and shoddy
> analysis contained therein, Mr. Somersby does that more than well
> enough) while seeing their emptiness as i read, rather than having
> that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach afterwards. I tend to
> assume (partially based, i admit, on Stanley Rothman's rather
> tendentious survey from 1980 that started this whole thing) that many
> on the board of CJR are in fact Democrats, maybe even (the love that
> dare not speak its name) liberals. Your slavish devotion to
> "fairness" has led to a weird and sick kind of self-hatred that is all
> too perfectly crystallized in greenberg's piece. you should all take
> a nice long weekend in the Hamptons to think about what has gone wrong
> both with journalism in this country and with your own work.
>
> best,
>
>
> Robert Green

Hi Mr. Green. Jeez, you're a self-important kind of guy, aren't you? And a little pretentious? I'm actually going to a ball game. bye.

Mike Hoyt, CJR


Well, they got me good.