Gawker is usually clear in picking sides and almost always the Lib side (except one of its writers on border issues), but here appears to be all over the place.
KELLER was an a-hole from when he first took over at the NYT during Campaign 2000, when he told us he based his assessment of GORE on his three-year-old's reaction to GORE on t.v., running around repeating, "GORE is a bore, GORE is a bore," to the adults' glee. Now, three-year-olds are the biggest sychophants in the world for their significant family and unlikely to have reached the rhyming without having heard it from them first. The reader's comment on KELLER is spot on.
*************QUOTE*************
http://gawker.com/5744133/julian-assange-is-a-skipping-little-nancy-boy Julian Assange Is a Skipping Little Nancy Boy
New York Times editor Bill Keller has spilled the secrets about his paper's dealings with Wikileaks and Julian Assange in a new Times magazine piece. Upshot: Assange is a weird sissy nerd, and he probably eats boogers. ....
(Times reporter Eric) Schmitt told me (Bill KELLER) that for all Assange's bombast and dark conspiracy theories, he had a bit of Peter Pan in him. One night, when they were all walking down the street after dinner, Assange suddenly started skipping ahead of the group. Schmitt and Goetz stared, speechless. Then, just as suddenly, Assange stopped, got back in step with them and returned to the conversation he had interrupted.
When Schmitt, who served as the paper's point man for the Wikileaks relationship, first met Assange, he was "like a bag lady walking in off the street, wearing a dingy, light-colored sport coat and cargo pants, dirty white shirt, beat-up sneakers and filthy white socks that collapsed around his ankles. He smelled as if he hadn't bathed in days." That's interesting, but Keller seems to bring it up only to later contrast it with Assange's later transformation into a "cult figure" who "wore his hair dyed and styled, and ... favored fashionably skinny suits and ties." Mostly, for Keller, Assange was a whiny little thrower of tantrums, full of empty threats and an inflated sense of his own importance.
Which is all true! But there's something unseemly about Keller attacking him so openly and gleefully. This is the man, for better or worse, whose effort and innovation made possible the little e-book Keller is hawking. He had accomplished reporting feats—in terms of sheer breadth and volume—that no one at the Times ever had, or ever will, match. He had something that the Times desperately wanted, and shared it with them, for free. The fact that he's also an asshole doesn't mean Keller ought to go on braying about it, especially after two of his reporters had already done an exceptional job of revealing him as such. At one point, according to Keller, Assange lamely demanded of the Times, "Where's the respect? Where's the respect?" Reading Keller's snide take evisceration of a guy who, in the end, did him a massive and invaluable service, you kind of get his point. ....
Send an email to the author of this post at john@gawker.com.
********COMMENT BY READER, “I’m a Bottle” :
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that Bill Keller is even there.
Pretty much every major issue during the first decade of 2000
(Iraq, Bush's abuses of power, Judy Miller, and now Assange) were seriously misjudged by Keller. He might as well just have flipped coins to decide on whether to back the Iraq war or whether to support the Bush narrative on WMD or go down the Judy Miller rabbit hole, he would have been right at least half of the time. That this guy has any editorial position, let alone the most important and prestigious in the country, is a testament to the fine people who work for him.
*************UNQUOTE*************
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
