Behind the News
The Man Who Knew Too Little and Wrote Too Much
Jon Friedman occupies a singular place in the world of media criticism - we’re just not sure what it is.
By Paul McLeary Mon 20 Mar 2006 04:53 PMMedia critics are a strange lot. They’re often better writers than they are reporters — which may be why they got their gigs in the first place. But that’s not a hard and fast rule. Critics like Slate’s Jack Shafer and the Boston Phoenix’s Mark Jurkowitz are both good writers and capable of original reporting, which is precisely what makes their work so good. On the other hand, there are a handful of critics who aren’t felicitous writers, but whose ability to get at a story makes up for that particular shortcoming.
Sadly there’s a fourth category of critics, whose reporting is as lackluster as their prose. The leader of this last bunch would likely be Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman, who we’ve been reading for some time now, thanks in part to constant links to his thrice-weekly column on Romenesko.
Friedman is a puzzling case. At first, we wondered if he was just a fount for whatever the conventional media wisdom of the moment was — but that’s an unfair rap. Then the possibility presented itself that he was trying to get ahead of the conventional wisdom, which gave rise to his oddly disconnected body of work. But that one didn’t stand up, either. So we finally settled on an option that seems to work: Friedman occupies the odd cultural space of both upholding conventional wisdom while struggling mightily to understand it himself.
Take Friedman’s column of last Friday, in which Friedman wrote of this year’s fall-off in the number of National Magazine Award nominations for The New Yorker, to 5 this year from 10 last year and 11 in 2004. (The Columbia School of Journalism co-sponsors the awards with the American Society of Magazine Editors, but CJR isn’t involved in the process.)
Friedman smells conspiracy here, brooding darkly that editors of other magazines, sick with envy at The New Yorker’s handsome budget, ample feature well and seemingly endless stable of talent, have “ganged up on The New Yorker — yes, The New Yorker — as a way to hold down its National Magazine Award nominations (and, by extension, the number of its victories).”
That’s great gossip, but, like so much gossip, it doesn’t come close to passing the smell test. Friedman not only doesn’t bother to support his thesis in any meaningful way (a failing that ties together his entire body of work), but opts instead to spend the rest of the piece wandering around like a lost tourist remarking on the arcana of the magazine industry’s ad rates, New Yorker editor David Remnick’s general disposition and dubious awards handed out in the past.
What he forgot to include is that it has been reported that someone or someones at the New Yorker inadvertently submitted the wrong issues in at least two categories, leading judges in those categories to exclude the title from consideration. As with so much else, Friedman doesn’t necessarily get anything wrong, but by time he wraps things up it’s clear he hasn’t gotten anything accomplished, either.
Last week, Friedman wrote another column counter-intuitively headlined “Mike Wallace has a complicated legacy.” He states, after three paragraphs of praise for Wallace, that, “I’m really not much of a Mike Wallace fan.” Seems Friedman didn’t like the “gotcha” brand of journalism Wallace practiced, oh, 30 years ago or so. But, he’s quick to add, he’s happy to “overlook” the one big ethical lapse that Wallace made during his career — his capitulation to CBS brass in agreeing to soften a 60 Minutes report on the cigarette industry in 1995. (The movie The Insider was based on the episode). Wallace also lied to interviewer Charlie Rose during this time, claiming that CBS didn’t pay its source, Jeffrey Wigand. Turns out, CBS had paid Wigand $13,000. Apparently, going belly-up on an important story and lying about paying off sources is less of a crime to Friedman than bullying interviewees. But in the end Friedman changes his mind again, deciding early Wallace was actually great stuff: “Might, indeed, made right — and, not so coincidentally, it made for great TV as well.”
It’s tough to contradict yourself several times in under 1,000 words, but Friedman proves that he’s up to the task. More troublesome is his brush-off of CBS’s massive capitulation in the notorious tobacco case; it’s a complicated story to be sure, but it’s the job of a media critic to care about things like this, and not simply dismiss it.
In another stunner last week, Friedman got on board in criticizing the press’s performance leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, turning in a run-of-the-mill piece of wisdom that has hardened into convention. Unremarkable stuff, except that in the end, it takes a positively Friedmanesque turn for the incomprehensible. Friedman closes the piece with a fellow reporter telling him, “It’s very difficult to rage against the machine when one political party controls the town,” to which Freidman replies, “I remember something James Reston … once said: Always look for the unhappy guys. By that, Reston meant: unhappy people have the most to gain by talking to reporters. So, it seems logical that the greater the Republican Party’s stranglehold over Washington politics, the more opportunities enterprising reporters have to get leaks from disgruntled Democrats.”
After shaking off the unsatisfying suddenness with which the piece ends, it’s still hard to know what to make of this conclusion. Is he saying that reporters should press Democrats for leaks about Republicans? Well, if D.C. is controlled by Republicans, what would Democrats have to leak? It’s almost as if a chunk of Friedman’s logic was edited out, but the conclusion was left in. The piece screams for some editorial help, which one would assume Dow Jones would be able to offer.
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Frank Malatesta
Tue 21 Mar 2006 09:48 AMI thought your analysis was spot-on. I am a regular reader of Marketwatch.com, which in general is really quite good, and I can't tell you how many times I have read Friedman's stuff and, as you say, have cringed.
One aspect of his work that bears mentioning is his practice of writing puff pieces, particularly on others in the media. Such stories lack the internal contradictions that you noted, but make up for that by being very simply awful. The worst example of this was a series last year on other media writers! His hero-worshipping article on Ken Auletta was particularly gag-inducing.
While Mr. Auletta is indeed a superb writer, we certainly did not need a piece from Jon Friedman telling us that. Puff pieces on other media critics might be interpreted (as it was by me) as an effort to curry favor with powerful colleagues. Sure enough, Friedman was praised by Auletta in a piece in PR week some months later. See http://www.prweek.com/us/login/?fuseaction=required&nNewsID=535511
Marketwatch is prime real estate and it is a shame that its media criticism is handled in such a lamentable fashion.
Grim Reaper
Tue 21 Mar 2006 06:12 PMThis commentary is right on the mark. Friedman's columns dawdle a lot, rambling on and just muse on things with no backup, sort of like Larry King's old blowhard column in USA Today.
Media criticism means a real understanding of what the field is about -- how TV, magazines, newspapers and radio works (whoops, no radio in Friedman's world). You have to do your homework, have a real point and lead to it cohesively. There is nothing in Friedman's background that suggests a great understanding of the media, or even if he's covered it much at all.
One cure -- and I do agree: Friedman's column should be once or maybe twice a week. Perhaps that will force him to focus on his articles, rewriting and researching them.
Right now, his column is just pie-in-the-sky spitballing, which is as bad as the other awful media critic, Michael Wolff, who would rather get a root canal than do actual reporting.
MAL
Tue 21 Mar 2006 07:42 PMThank god Friedman's flatfooted, insight-free commentary has finally been called to task. I gave up reading his reports because he seems not to understand either church or state and his writing is infelicitous. Three strikes.
You'd think someone at Marketwatch/Viacom would notice that Friedman's pieces neither contain nor report on journalism (and the rough ride it's been taking). They also fail to plumb the business side. But sadly, in this arena he is not alone: The NY press (at least) is more smitten by hype than by a basic understanding P+Ls. You'd think someone out there would learn to tally up how much advertising or circulation revenue is needed to sustain life.
Last, as noted above, Friedman's stories often seem driven by access...thanks, I bet, to favor-currying with corporate PR types--especially at the likes of Time Inc.
pkward![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.cjr.org/nav-commenters.gif)
Mon 11 Feb 2008 10:15 AMI've just encountered Mr. Friedman's writing and I have this hypothesis: He views it as his duty to be controversial and idiotic, in order to drive comments on his blog postings. Perhaps he's compensated for the number of postings? This would not be an unusual choice for a performance metric by a company that wants to generate more advertising revenue (and who doesn't yearn for ad revenue).
I admit I'm searching for a market-based rationale for his postings. I find it hard to believe his actual views are that fuzzy, poorly reasoned and/or misanthropic. I want to believe he is a better writer with a more nuanced point of view.
If he is indeed measured, at least in part, by the number of postings he generates, then MarketWatch is not being well-served. Perhaps they want bloggers on staff that engage their audiences, and measure that engagement by the number of comments generated by readers.
But. "Engagement" with your market does not mean "high level of interaction". Gallup's customer engagement practice has shown convincingly that the four drivers of engagement are: people's level of confidence in you; their assessment of your integrity; their pride in being associated with you; and their passion for what you stand for.
I would think that Mr. Friedman's blog entries would fail the Gallup test. If MarketWatch wants an engaged readership to drive ad revenue, they'll want to read up a bit on what it takes to engage people, not enrage them.