THE ONLY GOOD MICHAEL KELLY ...: In a bizarre, two-day rant, Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler spits on the grave of Michael Kelly while painting a caricature of the media that could have come straight from the extended dance mix of Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry." Of course, this spitting is done daintily, so that you hardly notice it, and it's followed by a dab at the corners of the mouth with a lace handkerchief of qualifications. But it's a load of spittle nonetheless. Let's look at this closer.
On
Day One, we note that Somerby is careful to say that "no one wishes for a premature death" and that "Kelly was a very nice person—in his private dealings." But then we find out that Kelly was "a relentless dissembler" and "the equivalent of a loud, angry drunk" who "did deep damage to his country’s discourse —and as such, he harmed the public interest." Later, discussing praise for Kelly from
The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, we are instructed that "sensible people who 'knew Kelly through his columns' disliked him
for his assaults on simple decency and for the damage he did to the American public discourse." (Emphasis Somerby's.)
Apparently, the only good Michael Kelly is a dead Michael Kelly. And the only good "discourse" is that which doesn't offend Bob Somerby, i.e., talking points straight from the Democratic National Committee presented without challenge.
But the "meat," such as it is, of Somerby's argument is found by sifting through the flood of eulogy columns from Kelly's colleagues. What has he turned up? "Proof" of the venality of the press, because it seems that a lot of people actually
liked Michael Kelly personally even though they disagreed with him politically. Apparently, Somerby believes that someone who expresses political views contrary to your own is not just someone you disagree with in one area of your life; that person is, by definition, a person who is beneath contempt, a person whose life is not worth celebrating.
Somerby damns Kelly as a shoddy journalist because of mistakes he made in some of his opinion columns for
The Washington Post -- which was just one part of Kelly's long and varied journalistic career, most of which Somerby deliberately ignores. One "smoking gun" is this excerpt from a
Hanna Rosin memorial:
Life under Mike was The Children’s Hour. Try to choke down this ugly picture of the way your public discourse is conducted:
[W]ith countless [people who didn’t know Kelly], I found myself helping square what Mike himself called “the two Mikes.” Those [choleric] columns were him, for sure; when I worked for him at the New Republic I’d seen him bang out plenty in half-hour fits of pique or passion. (One hilariously mean one about Robert Reich as Walter Mitty he practically dictated out loud, in the 10 minutes it took us to walk from the coffee shop back to the office.) But taken alone, they created an all-too-dark impression of him.
It was “hilarious” when Kelly was so “mean,” Rosin says—and Kelly would bang out his “fits of pique” in ten minutes.
Somerby seems to think that the speed Kelly employed to churn out copy was all the fault of Kelly and not the fault of something Somerby obviously has little experience with: THE PRESSURE OF FILLING BLANK PAGES ON A TIGHT DEADLINE. A good percentage of the content of daily and weekly publications is produced under just such deadlines -- not hours, but minutes, depending on breaking news. Deadline pressure has always shaped "the way your public discourse is conducted."
If this is satire (Somerby is an alleged stand-up comedian), it certainly falls far short of Swift.
On Day Two, Somerby's fevered imagination conjures up images of reporters who won't speak out against a "terrible 'journalist' " such as Kelly because they see a chance for career advancement in eulogizing him. Again, we get no sense of the basic human decency that so many saw in Kelly, his quest for excellent writing in himself and those under him, the non-ideological manner in which he edited stories. Here's what Chait said about that editing style:
One fact about Mike that his readers did not know was that he had an unparalleled gift for editing prose. I've worked for some fantastic editors, and none of them came close to Mike in this regard. A writer often hopes his editor will change as little as possible. With Mike it was just the opposite. The first time I wrote a cover story for the New Republic, he rewrote the first half nearly from scratch. He sent me the draft, and told me that if there were any parts I didn't like, I was free to change them. I read over his handiwork - it was breathtaking - and I called to say only that I wished he'd rewritten the other half as well.
The "journalism" Somerby sneers at is much more than dashing off opinion columns. Great editing may be the most important -- and most unrecognized -- aspect of the whole shebang. It's a fact that Somerby has either forgotten or is deliberately ignoring in order to discredit someone he didn't agree with politically. Certainly, Kelly's Washington Post columns could be quite screedy, as were a lot of his columns for The New Republic. But Somerby makes virtually no mention of Kelly's skills as an editor other than sneering at missteps made under his watch at The New Republic -- most of which can be laid at the feet of the fraudulent reporting of one writer, Stephen Glass. As Washington Post staffers can tell you, Kelly is not the first editor to be fooled by too-good-to-be-true reporting. I wonder if Somerby will piss on Ben Bradlee's grave after he goes on to that great newsroom in the sky. By Howlerian standards, the Janet Cooke fiasco allows him to let someone else's dishonesty define the career of the man who led the Post to its greatest journalistic glories. But I won't hold my breath for that.
More tellingly, Somerby completely ignores Kelly's universally praised boots-on-the-ground reporting of Gulf War I and his few dispatches from the recent conflict. Here's an excerpt from Jack Shafer's tribute to Kelly, quoting former TNR editor Hendrik Hertzberg about Kelly's war reporting:
Kelly had covered the first Gulf War with the fierce independence that defined his life. In that war, the Pentagon barred all but a few pool reporters from the battlefield, and Kelly, who persuaded the Boston Globe and New Republic to let him cover the war as a stringer, put his life on the line by free-lancing his way onto the front.
"He simply walked away from the whole apparatus of information management there and hitched a ride on an Egyptian tank," says Hendrik Hertzberg, then editor of the New Republic. This was the dangerous war, the battle against an unknown but potent foe in an unfamiliar land. Kelly traversed Iraq, filing extraordinary dispatches that he eventually reworked into his 1993 book, Martyr's Day: Chronicle of a Small War. ...
"He was just incandescent," Hertzberg says. "War was the perfect subject for him. He was so full of emotion and yes, anger, too. And war was the subject that gave that its fullest scope."
Kelly's most memorable piece from the war described the Iraqi corpses and burned-out vehicles from the now-famous "Highway of Death."
"He was amazing at seeing," says Hertzberg. "He cranked up the color and the contrast, and, Pow! So you as the reader saw it with some of the vividness that he saw it."
And Somerby doesn't even mention Kelly's award-winning work at The Atlantic Monthly. Someone please tell me why he's considered the kind of serious media critic who gets invited to speak to state press associations?
For more on Michael Kelly and Somerby, check out Romenesko's Letters page.
