Crit Fight!

The last great spat among high-profile media folks was between James Woolcott and Kurt Andersen. Today, the sparks are flying between Jack Shafer and Michael Wolff.

We don’t have strong preferences for a winner, although we have a couple of peanut-gallery-type observations to make. Shafer is by far the more thorough and accountable reporter, Wolff is the better writer. Neither is a particularly sympathetic character, and therefore neither can possibly come off very honorably in a clash of egos. To the credit of both, neither is afraid to take their whacks at sacred cows—and having undergone a slowish process of canonization themselves in the past five years, each is now mooing the protests of the whackee. (This is new territory for Shafer. Recall: he is the doyen of Slate, the would-be editor-in-chief who probably deserved Michael Kinsley’s job more than Jake Weisberg did, but probably had his fill of being management back in his Washington City Paper days; Wolff, who has received many well-deserved whacks over the years, inexplicably landed at a columnist’s desk at New York magazine. He is a writer who’s single victory in the meritocracy was a tepid, trendy book about his failure as an internet mogul… come to think of it, we can’t recall a better example of someone in media who has so dramatically failed upward his whole public career.)

You can call a reporter or a media critic just about any name in the book, and he’ll take it as a compliment (something about being “old school,” or “hard-bitten” or a “stogie-smoking leathershoe” and all that nonsense), but don’t ever accuse him of being lazy. Aside from running violently against the nap of our perpetual martyr complex, it smacks of an ethical violation. And no one is more sensitive about ethical violations than a journalist.