There’s little I can add to John Nichols’s wonderful appreciation of David Carr, the writer and New York Times media critic who died Thursday night at age 58. “What made Carr the necessary guide through an ever-expanding maze of conflicts and contradictions” in the media world, Nichols writes, “was not that he always knew the way. In an age of stupid certainty, and the cruel choices that extend from it, he reminded us to cling to our humanity as we explored the unknown together.”
So I’ll add this, one of his last interviews. Other sites have posted the hour-long panel discussion—with Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glenn Greenwald—that Carr moderated just hours before he collapsed shortly before 9 pm in the Times newsroom. But there’s another interview worth a long listen. On Monday, on Brian Lehrer’s WNYC radio show, Carr, Lehrer, and Andrew Tyndall take on the Brian Williams fiasco. It’s a rich and nuanced discussion, about memory, celebrity, journalism and confusion—and Carr, as usual, brought to it a wisdom and a generosity of spirit, something that’s increasingly rare in today’s media.
