|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
It seems like everyone these days is a press critic, but you take what we might call a more activist approach. The book contains your Wimblehack series from the New York Press, which attempted to determine who was the worst journalist on the campaign trail. [Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, who recently filed a dispatch about the songs on Bush's iPod, was the eventual winner.] Did that make people angry?
There was one guy from the Times who actually asked me to step outside. He complained that I had insulted Jodi Wilgoren because I said she looked like Ernest Borgnine, and he sent me an e-mail basically saying, "Let's fight."
I think that normal press criticism is great: It makes people aware of the media to a degree that they never were before, but it doesn't have a whole lot of practical effect. FAIR will issue a press release pointing out an error, or some unethical practice, or some pattern in press coverage. So what? It's not going to change anything. My thinking, going back to the eXile, is that reporters are people too; they're sensitive and they're vain, and if you make it personally painful for them, it can have a bit of a prophylactic effect. That's not the reason I do it; mostly I do it because I'm just a little bit of an aggressive person.
Did you see any results with this approach?
I have to be honest, no. But when I was in Russia, we certainly had an effect on the American press corps in Moscow. When we threw a pie made of horse sperm into the face of the New York Times Moscow bureau chief, who had won our "Worst Journalist in Moscow" tournament, that was something that all the journalists in Moscow noticed.
There used to be different kinds of people who were journalists. There were real cynics, there were drunks, there were hardened smokers, and now there's this glamour and glow that goes along with being a part of the press corps. I guess what I'm trying to do is take away some of that glow and make it clear it's not quite as cool as they make it out to be. I don't know if that has an effect or not, but that's sort of the strategy.
- Jonathan Shainin, "Politics-a-palooza," salon may 12, 2005
posted May 12, 2005 in politics, print, speech. 20042001