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Sunday, December 21, 2008

The Terrible Journalism of Alessandra Stanley

Alessandra Stanley should go back to writing about television. I gather she wasn’t very good at that, either, but her pieces – and I shudder to call them pieces – on politics and the economy that have appeared over the last month in the New York Time have been wretched. The first piece she wrote that caught my attention covered President-elect Obama’s press conference unveiling Sen. Clinton as Secretary of State-designate. It was a horrible, hack-job of a piece, widely reviled for Ms. Stanley projecting – and projecting enough to generate a thousand almost wholly fictional words. Now, she’s written a piece bemoaning the loss of the sex scandal due to the recession.

Most of us spent the last decade or more wishing that the news would begin covering, you know, news again. The endless drumbeat of non-stories and scandals pushed people away from politics and the political process. They also served as cover for perhaps the most disastrous Presidency this country has ever seen. Rather than covering the many, many sins of this administration, the media was, until late in 2006, mostly cowed by the administration. It seemed that no sin-not the bungling of an unnecessary war, not a war of choice, not the bungling of an arguable necessary war, not violating the principles that gave us our nation, not torture, not abuses of power, not intimidation, not politization of every facet of government-was sufficient to shine real scrutiny on this administration because at least there was no sex.

What a farce. Go away, Ms. Stanley. And take your nonsense journalism with you.

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