Sunday, April 24, 2005

Miner: Laziest man alive?

Posted by: spacecog

Our methodology here at The Reader Sucks is both straightforward and very, very lazy: we page through the Reader until we come to something that annoys us, then we write down the first things that pop into our heads. Hey presto! A post.

Seems Michael "THE CONVOLUTENATOR" Miner has a similar approach. The grain of sand around which his latest column grew was a week-old item in the New York Times on why people don’t trust the media. After digesting it, Miner glanced through a 15-page report from Pew Research on the subject. (Click "media.") Then he wrote up some vague maunderings about how kids ain’t reading the newspapers any more, and – hey, presto! – a column!

Oh sorry. Miner did one other bit of additional research: he took a quick peek at the cover of a Trib sports section. Because it featured a picture of baseball old-timers, Miner deduced that it was "a baseball section that knew it would never be glanced at by adolescent males."

Hmm. If the kids aren’t reading you, Mr. Miner, maybe it’s because you’re a patronizing windbag douche.

Also in "Hot" Type: Miner read a book on civil liberties that only mentioned the press in passing. So he emailed the author with some questions about the press. The author told him "I didn’t focus on the press." But he proceeded to offer some opinions on the subject and Miner was evidently so excited by this that he quoted several hundred intermittently enlightening words from these emails. Well, that’s one way to write a column, though maybe "write" is the wrong word.


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