Being A Little Unfair
I really like Spencer Ackerman. The guy is hilarious, amazingly smart and writes about foreign policy in such a clear, abrasive manner that I think we could use more of. His longform stuff, which isn’t as snarky (in a good way), is excellent too. We need more Ackermans in the liberal blogosphere, people who know a lot about the military and defense issues and can approach them from a left-wing standpoint without communicating contempt for the military. So, yeah, read his series about the development of counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and the US military establishment (Parts One and Two).
But Spencer’s seething attack on David Plotz and Jeffrey Goldberg for their running Slate commentary on The Wire is pretty unfair to both of them, but especially Plotz. Ackerman goes totally guilt-by-association to say that Plotz hated the Sun subplot because he’s a writer for Slate, meaning that his stuff gets published because it’s “clever, not what’s, you know, true.” There’s something to the Slate is too cute critique, they do, after all have Steven Landsburg writing for them. But in the case of Plotz, he shows how “cuteness” can make for some really good stuff. Look at this “Blogging the Bible” series. THis was the ultimate Slate gimmick. Here was a secular Jew who had never really read the Bible, who was going to read the whole thing and liveblog his way through it. Would there be any particularly original Biblical commentary? No, but it sure was fun to read. And it was cute.
His indictment of Jeffrey Goldberg is much more serious, however. Goldberg is one of those neocons who just so happens to be a pretty well respected journalist. In his days at the New Yorker, he was one of the most passionate advocates for the Iraq War. He wrote not just about WMDs, but also about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that turned out to be bogus. He was hardly a skeptical war supporter, as his Slate series with Bob Wright shows, he was full on calling opponents of the war immoral for being soft on fascism and genocide. Goldberg has never really come to grips with his pre-Iraq advocacy and journalism, and understandably, many anti-war folk hold him in contempt. But Ackerman says that Goldberg is “a reporter who does not care about whether what he writes is true or false, no matter what the consequences to peoples’ lives are, and who has no problem evading responsibility for his actions. Templeton is guilty of misdemeanors by comparison. If I were Goldberg, I’d whine about the show too. David Simon has his goddamn number.”
Why this is certainly one way of framing the case against Goldberg, I question its relevance to his discussions of The Wire. Just about every journalist, including Spencer’s American Prospect buddies, thought the journalist plot was overwrought and lame. And it was Simon’s fault, not Goldberg’s for calling out how obvious the good and bad guys were. While Simon claims, and I believe him, that his real point was to expose how they weren’t covering the systemic failures of Baltimore institutions, it only real came out why anyone should give a rat’s ass about the Sun in the final episode. Until then, it just seemed like Simon’s obsession and him working out personal vendettas, and it was just an annoying ancillary to other, much more compelling plot lines.
While the case against Goldberg is a strong one, it’s not clear how it relates to Wire criticism.
