DUMPING ON MISS RUN AMUCK

Elizabeth Barrett BrowningJudy Miller gets no sympathy from us, for all the obvious reasons. Still, the "Dump on Judy" movement, as an editorial in the New York Post puts it, does make the powers-that-be at The New York Times look pretty shabby (despite wrongly contending that "partisan politics" has trumped "journalistic ethics" ). Even our poet, who takes his inspiration from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, above, and not from the Post, says so:

HOW DO WE LOVE THEE?
LET US COUNT THE TIMES

"We're behind you, Judy, 700 percent,"
Aver both Bill and Pinch
As they greet her in the city room
And embrace her in a clinch.

Days later, "We're with you 300 percent,"
Affirm both Pinch and Bill.
And when the honeymoon goes kaboom:
"Judy, make that nil."

-- Leon Freilich

But here's one more reason not to have sympathy for Miss Run Amuck: Anyone who has ever worked in a newsroom knows there are plenty of lamebrains and boneheads -- call them editors -- eager to assert their authority (and that's not counting the smart but spineless ones) over reporters who challenge them. All these editors have to do now to get their way is point to the Judy fiasco.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

October 25, 2005 10:50 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on October 25, 2005 10:50 AM.

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