Damn Eric... tell us how you really feel...

Eric Alterman on TIME's Coulter article:

Time’s cover story/whitewash of Ann Coulter, here, will make it impossible for serious people to accept what the magazine reports at face-value ever again. It is as if Time had contracted a journalistic venereal disease from Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and is now seeking to lower itself to their level in pursuit of their ideologically-obsessed audiences.

This is a profoundly depressing realization as its managing editor Jim Kelly is a friend of mine and I respect both his intelligence and integrity and to be perfectly honest, I cannot find a way to reconcile my high opinion of Jim and the journalism he has produced, together with my respect for many of the professional reporters and editors at Time, with this moral, professional, and intellectual abomination. The fact that the system could produce a story like this one—one that was in the pipeline for months and had plenty of opportunities to be both fact-checked and reconsidered--is a moral and intellectual scandal and a permanent stain on the reputations of everyone associated with it, most particularly its author, John Cloud. Like New York Observer’s George Gurley, Cloud has accepted the role of an unpaid PR flack for a woman who frequently jokes about the mass-murder of journalists—including presumably, himself--and he professes to find this charming. And let us pause for a moment to note that today is the anniversary of the day that Timothy McVeigh did his horrid deed—the mass murder of men, women and children. Ms. Coulter and the moron, Gurley, thought it was so cute to joke about wishing he had accomplished at The New York Times. (I suppose it’s too much to worry about her calling for the mass murder of Arabs.)

With the resources of Time’s legions of researchers and fact-checkers, he relies on a casual Google search to determine that she can be “occasionally coarse” and that her work is “mostly accurate.” I spoke to one of those researchers and I’m quoted in the article. But more to the point, I pointed the researcher in the direction of many easily available sources that easily undermine Cloud’s lazy and credulous reporting. The entire package is a statement of contempt for the values for which Time professes to stand; another notch in the belt for the far-right’s forty-year campaign to destroy journalists’ role in assuring democratic accountability in our society.

Eric also goes on to echo the same thoughts I had regarding TIME's make-up of columnists:

While I’m alienating my friends, here, I suppose it is as bad a time as any to point out that Time’s political balance of columnists is badly skewed to the right in direct contrast to Newsweek’s. While the latter has the almost always excellent and genuinely liberal Jon Alter, together with the undeniably bleeding-heart Anna Quindlen to balance George Will and Robert Samuelson and Fareed Zakaria, who is perhaps America’s most thoughtful conservative pundit, now that David Brooks has decided to become something else entirely. (Other possible nominee: Chris Caldwell.) Time, meanwhile, has no one at all to balance right-wingers Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan save Joe Klein; a “liberal” of the Nick Kristof/"Even-the-liberal-New-Republic…" variety. This is no accident.

Eric baby... how about a link?!? Oh, yeah... I forgot I have a readership of like 5 people, and you ain't one of them. Nevermind.