David Carr, a columnist and reporter for The New York Times, has battled his own crack addition; he has survived cancer.
Perhaps strengthened by those struggles, he’s now taking on a force that sometimes sends other reporters running for the hills: The PR department of Fox News.
“Like most working journalists, whenever I type seven letters - Fox News - a series of alarms begins to whoop in my head: Danger. Warning. Much mayhem ahead,” Carr wrote at the beginning of his
The Media Equation column on July 7.
Despite those alarms Carr then went on to write about Fox News and what he saw as its unfair and perhaps anti-Semitic attack upon one of his Times colleagues, media beat reporter Jacques Steinberg.
Steinberg had written a news story about how CNN was gaining ground on Fox News, though Fox News clearly remained number one in the cable news department.
A few days after the story ran in the newspaper, Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy of “Fox and Friends” on Fox News had a segment that called Steinberg’s story a “hit piece.”
They said that Steinberg was an “attack dog” for his editor, Steven Reddicliffe, whom they described as a “disgruntled” former employee of the company that owns Fox.
The Fox report used doctored photos of Reddicliffe and Steinberg.
“In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, (Steinberg’s) ears were pulled out, his teeth played apart, his forehead lowered and his nose widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with,” Carr wrote.
Carr describes the Steinberg episode as typical of Fox. Carr says the network doesn’t cooperate during the reporting of a story, and then it turns upon the reporter after the story is out.
He suggests that this strategy may actually keep good stories about Fox out of the media, as reporters become wary of approaching the network and the network, in turn, is always suspicious of non-Fox reporters.
On the other hand, Carr stresses that Fox cooperated fully with him in the reporting of his story. “A guy could get used to that,” he concludes.
Carr, 51, also notes that in some sense he’s attack-proof, as he has already aired most of his own dirty laundry.
The reporter had documented his addiction to crack in the 1980s in Minneapolis in his soon-to-be-published memoir, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own.. An adapted portion of the memoir appears in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
“Carr out-rocked some of the towns’ hardest rockers, writers, artists, and dopers, closing as many grimy bars as Charles Bukowski and ingesting more illegal narcotics than any Hunter S. Thompson-wannabe who ever lived to tell about it,” wrote Brian Lambert in The Rake, which covers cultural life in the Twin Cities.
Out of rehab, Carr was later diagnosed and treated for Hodgkin’s disease. Recovered, he edited an alternative weekly in the Twin Cities. From there he went to the Washington (D.C) City Paper and then Inside.com. He joined the Times in 2002.
Carr is often cited as a kind-of-exception to the rule at the Times.
He learned his craft on the alternative press; he writes with a distinct and often humorous style; and when he’s interviewed himself he speaks candidly and with energy.
Carr says he’s just doing what comes naturally:
“I’m a person who has owed people a lot of money I didn’t have,” he told Lambert. “I’ve had guns pointed at me. I’ve been a single parent. So being in a room and telling people things they might not be comfortable with, that doesn’t scare me. No big deal.”
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment