Michael Kruse on Maggie Haberman

I read Rage and I promised myself that would be the last one I waste time or money on. Very little new reporting for people who follow this chit every day.

As Trump's broader appeal wears thinner and thinner so does the shock value of his antics. That market correction is coming.

 

The good news is publishers are always thinking a few moves ahead and will absolutely anticipate this market correction and thus stop green-lighting Trump books!

 

the next wave of books I would expect to be essentially ethnographies of his follower base. [Nicolle Wallace voice: "How did we get here???????"]
Not as 'fun' as reading about ketchup tantrums, I suppose.

 

Second time in two days I've heard a version of ethnology.

Not sure I ever heard the word before yesterday.

 

I have mixed feelings about Maggie, but I don't see a lot of evidence that she "sat on" news to advance her own career with her book. I think she was pretty dogged in reporting things about Trump as they happened and as she got them. People want to believe this about her -- that she put her own ambition ahead of her role as a journalist -- but there doesn't seem to be any evidence to support it that I have read. In fact, she released the tidbit about Pence refusing to get in the car with the Secret Service ahead of the publication of the book because she (or she and the Times editors) felt it was too newsworthy to sit on.

I don't know that I believe the Times should have granted her book leave to continue to gather more stuff. But that is how these things work. She would likely not work for the Times if they didn't allow her to work for CNN and also get a book advance, because they cannot pay her what she could likely command elsewhere. Jonathan Swan wrote a book about Trump and didn't get accused of withholding information for it, even though there was stuff in there that wasn't in his reporting for Axios. Jonathan Lemire did the same, even though the book had reporting in it that wasn't in Politico or the AP. Why do we think Maggie gets singled out so frequently by people who have never so much as covered a school board meeting?

Letting subject hang themselves with their own words is a tricky balancing act. I experienced it last year with Aaron Rodgers, and I had the same people who attack Haberman coming after me insisting that I was being a stenographer for Rodgers and that I should have been calling him out at every turn. I did fact check him and challenge him on some things where he was blatantly wrong, but I also don't know that it's a feature writer's job to play Issac Chotiner. To me, some of Rodgers' opinions revealed him to be exactly the internet-brained Rogan listener he clearly is, and it's more devastating to let the subject hang himself.

Trump has changed some of that calculus because of what's at stake and I did enjoy the part in Kruse's piece where Haberman tried to give the Times Washington Bureau a crash course in Trumpism and they scoffed, thinking they knew better. She does understand what a craven liar he is, and most of the press still struggles with grasping with his motivations, trying to assign reason to any of them.

 

The Onion weighs in.

Journalists Marvel At Maggie Haberman’s Ability To Get Man Who Never Shuts Up To Answer Questions

 

See also: Rocker, John.

 

Let a thousand profiles bloom.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/202...man-covers-trump-without-losing-her-mind.html

“I Feel Like Now I Am Turning Into This Psychiatrist”: At Confidence Man Kickoff, Maggie Haberman Talks About What Makes Donald Trump Tick

 

Which part of his bio would a feature writer be playing if he/she/pronoun was playing Chotiner?

Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more. Before joining The New Yorker, Chotiner was a staff writer at Slate and the host of the podcast “I Have to Ask.” He has written for The New Yorker, the Times, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. After graduating from the University of California, Davis, Chotiner worked at The Washington Monthly before joining The New Republic, in 2006, as a reporter-researcher. He went on to run the magazine’s online books section and later became a senior editor.

Isaac Chotiner​

 

Would 2022 Jeff Pearlman be expected to turn around a short story the second Rocker said something stupid about people with AIDS or riding the 7 vs. holding it for SI?

 

Writers writing about writing writers.

LOL

 

He'd Tweet thru it and it'd be over in a day.