Tom's take on the ADN article [updated]
Thursday, April 5, 2007 at 7:04AM Goofy title that misses the entire thrust of my work.
Journalist never bothered to talk to me, despite my several attempts to set up a phonecall. One thing I learned early in my career: never underestimate the laziness of journalists. But frankly, it was like pulling teeth with this guy.
As for the content of the piece, hmmmm. How about I read the review on Amazon and maybe yesterday's post and call it a day?
Seriously, I don't rethink the war, I rethink the postwar. If I predicted several months before the war (remember, I write PNM the article in December 2002) that the postwar in Iraq is a going to be a doozy, and far harder than mega-jobs in Japan and Germany, how does this guy interpret that I "rethink the war"?
Such precision in language only matters if you want to further understandings instead of just agendas.
No one inside the defense community calls me a "hawk"--just the opposite in fact. Typically, I find such casual misidentifications with a certain whimsy, but you have to get off your ass and actually talk to me to gain such a pass. Yes, this guy's "attempts" were unsuccessful, but it wasn't because I was hard to reach, it's because he just didn't make the effort. If he had offered parenthically, "I just didn't put in the effort to actually talk to this guy, so I'm stitching bits and pieces that fit my predisposed opinion of him from his site," then I would have said, honesty in advertising.
Update: Editor's note: But, hey, they've got that article at the top of their Life page today, with a link here to the weblog, so that's a good thing. Welcome Alaskans!
In sharp contrast, let me cite two interviews I gave yesterday that were just great. One was with a Fairbanks radio host whose questions were in the top twenty of the maybe 500 interviews I've given since writing PNM. Excellent 8-minute segment that's running now in Fairbanks.
Other interview was some Juneau teenager (junior) who had used my work in her school project and just wanted to chat on the phone. Since she put in a bit more effort than our professional journalist from Anchorage, she got 50 minutes (good warm-up for me last night), because that's how seriously I treat such inquiries.
Reader Comments (10)
Nice!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/world/asia/06afghan.html
Well, the Cardinal gave my friend 30-40 minutes to do an interview for our school newspaper. I, as 15 year olds are want to be, was totally bored.
The gem of the story is, of course, that two years later that Cardinal Wojtyła would be elevated to John Paul II. That interview remains the highlight of my friend's journalistic career.
Posted by Mike Anglin | April 6, 2007 7:08 AM
It tells you everything you need to know about professional journalists.
Here's another report from Kurdistan by some guy from Portland who decided to buy his own airplane ticket and report what he sees on the internet.
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001412.html
How much longer do you think that "professional journalists" like the fellow in Anchorage will be able to get away with their contempt for facts and their audience?
This may seem obsessively punctilious; nevertheless, apart from everything else you note, any reporter who makes such a careless grammatical mistake or editor who doesn't catch it (and in a major newspaper, to boot) display a shockingly amateurish regard for the import of such errors in any piece of writing.
It makes me think they are:
a. awfully sloppy; and/orb. so single-minded and agenda-driven that they forgot to "cross all their (or should that be "there?") "Ts" and dot all their "Is."
Regardless, the mistake seriously detracts from their "message."