Notes &
Those are 56 words spent allowing Jesse M. Brill to restate the author’s point. Yet I, for one, have never heard of Jesse M. Brill before. He may be a fine fellow. But I have no particular reason to trust him, and he has no particular reason to need my trust. The New York Times, on the other hand, does need my trust, or it is out of business. So it has a strong incentive to earn my trust every day (which it does, with rare and historic exceptions). But instead of asking me to trust it and its reporter about the thesis of this piece, The New York Times asks me to trust this person I have never heard of, Jesse M. Brill.
Cut This Story! - The Atlantic (January/February 2010)
Michael Kinsley decries traditional news media and restates his advocacy for embracing opinion journalism head on (as many bloggers do). This article was a nice restatement, but his real tour de force came in his 2006, “The Twilight of Objectivity: How opinion journalism could change the face of news.” Definitely worth a read.
