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NY Times Editor Bill Keller Rips Book Review in Own Paper

It's about time the New York Times book reviews took some heat. But from the editor of the New York Times? Is that not just plain weird? Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, tears into an essay by Richard A. Posner that appeared on July 31 in, as you may have guessed by now, the New York Times.

Keller calls the Posner essay “mostly a regurgitation, as tendentious and cynical as the worst of the books he consumed.” He charges that Posner “weirdly” makes almost no distinction “within the vast category of American media, between those that are aggressively partisan and those that strive to keep opinion sequestered from news, between outlets that invest in serious reporting and those that simply riff on the reporting of others, between the sensational and the more high-minded, between organizations that hasten to correct errors and those that could not care less, between the cartoonish shout shows on cable TV and the more ambitious journalism of, say, the paper you are holding in your hands.

Time out while I think about this. ...thinking... thinking... thinking... Okay. Yeah. It's weird. Wouldn't it be easier to just fire a quiet shot from the stern and tell the folks down in the rowing room that Posner is not to be ”writing about“ any more ”books“ or you will throw a supreme hissy fit and make everybody walk the plank? Or do you not, as executive editor, have that kind of clout? Oh. But wait. Here's my favorite quote from Mr. Keller's letter:

I suppose the best refutation of the view that ”the media“ are guided solely by narrow self-interest, however, is this: We published Posner.

Does this not make both Mr. Posner and the New York Times look shallow and ridiculous? Tell me watcha' thinkin' in the comments, okay? ♻ Editor and Publisher: 'NY Times' Editor Rips Book Review in Own Paper ♻ Book Review Letters [There may be an advertisement, but you can skip it.]

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