It’s extraordinary how commonplace these kind of sentiments are among prominent media figures. Cohen clearly relishes his self-conception as an independent thinker. And presumably the whole reason he’s glad to be a Washington Post columnist in part because that gives him a large audience of people who care about politics. Given all that, of course people will sometimes disagree with him! But that’s now how he sees it, and certainly he sees no need to engage with his critics on the merits — instead, they’re just like Communists!
The whole mindset is bizarre but also bizarrely widespread. You’d think that people who write for a living about public affairs wouldn’t be so thin-skinned.
Isn't this partially a function of ideological proximity? Liberals are sensitive to Cohen because he's supposedly a liberal columnist but is more of an establishment hack in practice. Similarly, Cohen is sensitive to liberal disapproval because his personal views seems to tend toward the center-left. By contrast, I assume conservatives have always disliked Cohen but they ignore him and he does the same. It's not unlike what happened to Joe Klein when he started blogging a few years ago and found out that liberals were unhappy with him.
In semi-defense of Cohen and the other MSMers who hate the dirty f*cking hippies -- before the rise of the blogosphere, their personal email accounts weren't bombarded with profane hate mail. I know that that's just the way it is now for anyone who writes about politics, but for people who got most of their feedback from the polite Beltway pundit world in the pre-blogosphere days, it makes sense for them to be unprepared for and a bit frightened of this new development.
However, too many of these "independent thinkers" use the fact that they get profane hate mail as an excuse to avoid re-examining their own work to see whether their critics have a point. Joe Klein used this excuse to downplay the liberal blog criticisms for quite a while before largely buying into their worldview.
Posted by: JimmyM | August 25, 2008 at 10:30 AM
I don't know, JimmyM. My guess is that, at most, one out of a hundred emails these guys get is profane. They just use that 1% to brand every critic with the same brush.
Of course, that's why people send them emails laced with profanity. Those are the only ones that get noticed.
Posted by: Jinchi | August 25, 2008 at 12:56 PM
I'm also amazed that these guys never recognize the irony in the argument that anybody who criticizes them must hate free speech.
Posted by: Jinchi | August 25, 2008 at 01:02 PM