October 28, 2004
Jim Rutenberg is Dumb
There has been a recent rash of pieces by journalists bemoaning the nasty tone of the letters they've been receiving from their readers. Personally, I think the real issue here is not that the tone of discourse of people who have traditionally written to journalists has taken a turn for the worse, but rather the convergence of two issues:
Now, I'll be the first to admit that telling Adam Nagourney that you hope his son gets killed in a Republican war is a pretty nasty thing to say, although I would counter that Adam is a semi-public figure who gets to go on the Charlie Rose Show, and the unfortunate downside of being a semi-public figure is that people might write you really nasty e-mails. But I really have to take issue with today's piece in the New York Times on the same topic: "Most of us now realize that this is a constant conversation, and I think that largely that part of it is good," said Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek. "Some of the stuff includes very personal and nasty things about people - they go after people's physical characteristics, they'll say somebody's ugly - and you just have to ignore that." It's certainly infantile to call people ugly and dumb when you disagree with their reportage, but I think it's equally (if not more) infantile to use your privileged position in the paper of record to whine about it. How thin-skinned are these people? Do they go to their mamas and cry whenever the mean bloggers call them names? 'Cause we've heard a few things about their mamas, too.
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