According to my archives, in the entire ten year history of this blog, New York Times media critic David Carr has only been mentioned once on the front page. And it wasn’t me who mentioned him. In April 2007, I did a piece on Don Imus talking racist smack about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. As part of that, I quoted Howard Fineman who made reference to a column David Carr had written on the subject. In other words, I have never mentioned David Carr; I have never linked to him; and I don’t think I even knew that he existed.
I have spent ten solid years writing about the media, including many of the beat reporters and pretty much all of the columnists at the New York Times. And David Carr didn’t make the slightest impression on me. I don’t have a single word to say about him, good or bad. His influence on the blogosphere, as near as I can tell, was close to nil.
I went through the diarists’ archives here to see if it was just me. But, no, none of you ever wrote about this guy, either. I found one diary from Cogitator in 2006, but he was just quoting him from three years earlier.
“This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right.”
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)
In 2007, Susan Hudgens briefly cited Carr in a long piece in which numerous other sources were mentioned.
As far as I can tell, these are all the mentions made of David Carr by anyone on this site, ever.
Which is why I found the following quite puzzling:
Almost nobody is irreplaceable. It’s a maxim that’s just as true in journalism as it is on an assembly line. Nostalgics may think there will be a Brian Williams-sized hole in the NBC broadcast going forward, but the truth is that Lester Holt will do just fine. Viewers adjust.
And after a half-hour of schadenfreude on Journalism Twitter, reporters adjust, too. Then they careen on to the next instance of alleged plagiarism, the next momentary burst of collective outrage. Storytellers can’t resist a narrative arc’s descent, undeterred by the reality that they, themselves, are not immune. When one person flies too close to the sun, journalists witness the plunge—and then scuffle to don their own wings.
None of this applies to David Carr, who died Thursday at 58. In the fluid, esoteric world of media criticism, his weekly column—generous yet incisive analyses on our characters and foibles, our triumphant experiments and spectacular failures—was journalism’s Monday-morning anchor. The first media read of the week, it was generally the best; insidery enough for industry know-it-alls and contextualized enough that my 92-year-old grandfather felt informed. The rest of the week’s micro-scoops and hot takes are entertaining. Sometimes, they’re even thoughtful and good. But Carr was consistently great.
Look, I don’t have one bad word to say about the guy. I’m sorry he died. I hear his struggle with addiction was inspiring. I’m not here to talk ill of the dead.
I’m just saying, he’s plenty replaceable.
