I guess one takeaway here is: when you step forward to call out a bully -- a hack, a loud and lazy and ungenerous thinker -- there may be a lot of people who were waiting around, eager for someone to say something.
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I'm really not trying to be self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing here. As a perpetual student of news-media and Rhode Island, I'm just fascinated by the response. And gratified too, of course.
I really hope I'm wrong, but I wonder if he'll write a follow-up about the column's response.
He's done this before: written a shitty, inflammatory column which (predictably) sparks an outcry, and then written a follow-up "Get a load of the blowback I received!" column.
I think news readers in this state are hungry for good perspectives to read, and it’s very frustrating when one of the few high profile ones is just fluff or hackery.
One time he wrote an awful column about homeless people, so the RI Homeless Advocacy Project invited him to come join them on outreach, he wrote a nice follow-up column that really humanized the issue, then some years later wrote an anti-homeless rant again like he’d learned nothing.
Ridiculous! I wrote letter about his cantankerous ass as a high schooler. Boomers are clinging to power and simultaneously baffled that the younger generations don’t have “experience” or “work ethic”
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He's done this before: written a shitty, inflammatory column which (predictably) sparks an outcry, and then written a follow-up "Get a load of the blowback I received!" column.
A seasoned hack's trick.
Seems kinda like it’s all a game to him. There’s a real glibness to how he approaches the gig.
And there was indeed a fair amount of solidarity.
But yes it definitely went off the rails.