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Keller: Stanley keeps her job because she's "a brilliant critic"
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Wrong, but still brilliant?
Posted by
Robert Laurence
8/5/2009 5:14:19 PM
Would Keller call a critic 'brilliant' in any field but television after so many demonstrations of ignorance of the field? How long would a class...
Would Keller call a critic 'brilliant' in any field but television after so many demonstrations of ignorance of the field? How long would a classical music critic stick around after confusing Beethoven and Brahms?
Stanley said that Letterman sprinted across the stage during Conan O'Brien's first week to imitate an O'Brien stunt. As anyone who watches Letterman even occasionally knows, Letterman does that all the time. She should have known that, even if night-worker editors didn't. One small example.
My suspicion -- the editors who value Stanley for her "intellectual heft" are the sort of editors who take pride in telling people they never watch television.
Critic Stanley
Posted by
JT Floore
8/5/2009 3:32:45 PM
i have read ms. stanley over the years and haven't noticed anything so outstanding or insightful about her criticism. in fact, she often seems pe...
i have read ms. stanley over the years and haven't noticed anything so outstanding or insightful about her criticism. in fact, she often seems petty and needlessly snarky, as if she writes to amuse herself with what she considers to be her own clerveness.
of course, it doesn't really matter whether she actually is a brilliant critic. what matters in the real world is whether her bosses THINK she is a brilliant critic.
i suspect there are alot of differing opinions inside the times.
I was taught to do this in j-school
Posted by
Alex Dering
8/5/2009 12:39:12 PM
It's called grilling.
Bill Keller: We love a conspiracy theory, but the truth is simple: Alessandra has been allowed to continue as a critic...
It's called grilling.
Bill Keller: We love a conspiracy theory, but the truth is simple: Alessandra has been allowed to continue as a critic because she is -- in my opinion, among others -- a brilliant critic.
Let's cut to the heart of it. Who are these other people who believe Stanley is "a brilliant critic"? Their names, please. Their credentials? Where are there impassioned defenses of a writer who works for the New York Times who cannot even get right the date of the first Moon landing or the date Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot?
I've read Stanley's stuff. I do not see any instances of her writing being significantly superlative to that of any number of currently unemployed journalists. She is hardly perched alone on the right-side of the bell curve.
Can you give us a few of the gems of her brilliance?
Stanley's writing is not brilliant, and you need to look more dispassionately at her work and judge it for what it is and what exactly motivates you to defend her sloppiness with such vigor.
New York Times writers should not be making Journalism 101-level mistakes. And your staff of editors and fact-checkers should not allow the public to catch them appearing to be scared to death to confront a writer for fear of retaliation via her connections to the Powers That Be. (Really, that's what this whole thing has a strong whiff of.)
Mr. Keller, you're defending someone who has demonstrated -- repeatedly -- an inability to come up to basic journalism standards. And I can't be the only one who really would just like the single, one-sentence truth about why this is happening.
That doesn't make me a conspiracy nut, that makes me a skeptical journalist. Because I know that if I made mistakes like Stanley's, I would not be unemployed because of layoffs. I would be unemployed because of gross incompetence.
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