How Angry NYT Editors and HBO's Bored to Death Make the Case for Media Reporting →
John Koblin’s having a pretty good day. Did anyone watch Bored to Death’s season premierelast night? Remember the Orangina scene? John Koblin wrote it for them:
Stories like this one and other great media tales create a compelling narrative, despite an often limited reach among more readers, which is too bad. For one thing, someone’s gotta report on the reporters.
But for another, there’s an old saying in politics that there are two things nobody should watch get made: sausage and laws. They might want to put “media” on that list, because reading the story is often, really, only part of it, and nuanced understandings of how they come to be? The uglier side of things? That’s where media reporting comes in, and it’s often met with great hostility by its subjects, who are typically the ones scrutinizing, and not being items of scrutiny. Why not?
Probably because most of this information is never entirely necessary to know for the general population — with very, very significant exceptions — but it is pretty interesting and fun stuff no less, and a large part of the reason, one would imagine, people do it for a job.
