Salon’s Alex Pareene has assembled a Top Ten Hackorama of Political Journalists and it’s a corker (tip o’ the pixel to AlterNet).
Pareene blowtorches some of the most notable members of the chinstrokerati, “[channeling] each media figure’s ‘unique’ voice — and [letting] them ‘write’ their own entries.”
Call the roll:
#10: The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell (“What if, sometimes, a bad writer is better than a good writer? Could writing bad books be better than writing good ones?”)
#9: The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman (“When I was in Singapore, I talked to hundreds of Asian college students, business people and diplomats, and while none of them said this to me, exactly, it’s basically my thesis and so I’m going to put it in quotation marks as a sort of ‘distillation’ of things I probably was told by people . . .” )
#8: The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan (“There’s a woman on a porch in eastern Ohio, and she has a dog, and diabetes, and a family, and seven grandchildren. The part of Ohio she lives in is vague, like so much of America . . .”)
#7: Business Insider’s Henry Blodget (“The article was about how a man named Henry Blodget flew on an airplane. He wrote, ‘I got a free pillow.’ And then, under that, he posted a picture of the pillow.”)
#6: RedState’s Erick Erickson (“With his soft physique and his inexplicable belief that ‘blogger’ is an appropriate job for a man who has a family to feed and protect, Erickson represents the epitome of the modern beta male.“)
#5: The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen (“I’m afraid I can’t deny reality. It’s time to grow up, and admit that not letting black people go to stores is just a sadly necessary response to the real, and important, fears of white people.”)
#4: NYT Columnist David Brooks (“The president immediately takes to the Columnist. They bond over their shared habit of mentioning having read Edmund Burke.”)
#3: BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson (“In July 2013, Johnson ‘wrote’ a Buzzfeed post headlined ‘The Story of Egypt’s Revolution in “Jurassic Park” Gifs.’ And that’s exactly what it was.”)
#2: Authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (“President Barack Obama had won reelection (Good, Obama thought), beating gaffe-prone former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (That’s a real shame, thought Romney), and now the ‘Game Change’ boys would have to write a book about it.”)
#1: Politico’s Mike Allen (“PAYOLA-BOOK: No professional blowback for sponsor-fluffing Mike Allen — LEIBO on ALLEN: ‘enabler’ — Business lobby agenda pushed daily — “Beyond parody” — Something about JOE SCARBOROUGH for some reason.”
Some of the parodies are very sharp, some merely dyspeptic, but all are generally on target. Notably absent: Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Bob Woodward, George Will, and etc.
There’s always next year.
