Democracy in America | Remembering David Carr

Media matters

The industry loses one of its finest observers

By A.E.S. | NEW YORK

“CHANGE comes very slowly, but then happens all at once,” observed David Carr, the New York Times’ media reporter, about the television business last year. As usual, his words proved prescient, capturing not only the upheavals that are now typical of this trade, but also the turn of his own life, and the paper he now leaves behind. On February 12th Mr Carr died at the Times offices, due to complications with lung cancer. At 58 he was one of the Times’ best-known reporters.

I met Mr Carr when I took over the media beat for The Economist, in the summer of 2012. His opinions were unfailingly sharp and confident, but in the Times café he appeared somewhat fragile, raising forkfuls of coffee cake with a shaky hand. Though his years of alcohol and drug addiction were behind him, they had left their mark. Yet his prose never wobbled. His writing was incisive, crisp and principled. His “Media Equation” column, published every Monday, raised a mirror to everyone in the business. His observations regularly defied conventional assumptions about media and technological change.

Mr Carr had a talent for being awkward but not self-conscious. He could make his interviewees squirm, which earned him stories and nuggets that eluded other journalists. Mr Carr did not consider politeness a virtue. He was quick to pounce whenever he sniffed out inconsistency, injustice or corporate spin. His list of victims even included his own boss, Mark Thompson, the chief executive of the New York Times Company. In a column last December he wrote that "declines in print advertising and circulation have created holes in revenue [at the New York Times] that a recent round of buyouts and layoffs can’t begin to fill."

His targets included himself. In 2008 he published “The Night of the Gun”, a memoir of his addiction presented as a work of investigative journalism. Using the tools of his trade, he retraced his own years as a crack addict and a drunk, reconstructing the life he had lived but not quite witnessed. In a column in November he explored why the media had brushed over the accusations of sexual assault facing Bill Cosby, a comedian, and ultimately implicated his own journalism. He could be funny, too. In his presentation at a media conference for advertisers last year, he compared his fashion sense to that of a tramp.

Mr Carr’s death comes at a time when Americans are losing faith in traditional media. The same week saw NBC suspend Brian Williams, a news anchor, for six months after viewers exposed as false a story he had told about his time in Iraq. In these uncertain times for this industry, it feels especially troubling to lose one of its finest observers.

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