Cohen: Online News Reading is Undermining My Sexist Stereotypes
A colleague observes to me that someone needs to tell Richard Cohen that you can read newspapers on your BlackBerry:
A BlackBerry is of limited utility. You cannot have a hearty family breakfast with everyone gathered around the BlackBerry. But with a good newspaper, the president could read the hard-news section, the first lady could adhere to gender orthodoxy and read the softer sections, and the kids could chuckle at the comics. Just as in the old movies, papa could explain things, like what’s the purpose of NATO anymore. (I’m dying to know this myself.) Not all newspapers have comic sections, but even those that don’t usually have sports pages and business columns.
A high-quality newspaper is a repository of leaks. Presidents don’t care for leaks, but like awful-tasting medicine, leaks are good for presidents. Leaks are an important way that one part of the government can communicate with another. An assistant Cabinet secretary cannot pick up the phone and call the president. His boss won’t let him. His boss might block something the president should know. This is where leaks come in. The low-level guy leaks the information to a newspaper and the president reads about it at breakfast. This cannot happen with a BlackBerry.
If the case for newspapers is that they help bolster gender orthodoxy, I think it’s probably a good thing that print is doomed.
47 Responses to “Cohen: Online News Reading is Undermining My Sexist Stereotypes”
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December 16th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
It’s really been astonishing how many columns Richard Cohen has written this year that amount to “I’m an old man, and don’t like new things.”
Unless this is some sort of iPhone propaganda.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Shorted Dick C.:
kids could chuckle at the business columns
December 16th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
And if another side benefit of the doom of print were Richard Cohen being unemployed, it can’t come soon enough.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
The bit about gender orthodoxy (which is a good thing by the way), was in some ways a joke, but if you want to pretend to be or are too stupid to understand how, it’s all good. You cany say long live novelty! Forget the dignity that information receives by having its own physical space. You just want to be informed and impatient.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
the fact that cohen is not embarrassed to write this stuff, and the wapo is not embarrassed to print it–unbelievable.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
How are the leaks not getting to the Blackberry again?
December 16th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Exactly how old is Cohen, anyway? Is he a baby boomer? Because he sounds like a baby boomer: constant nostalgia, pining for a “simpler time” that they didn’t even really experience, but saw on TV.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
shorter moral panicker: “you kids…etc.”
whether richard cohen jokes about or whiines about “gender orthodoxy” is no great shakes. when he drops the fuckin’ blackberry ball his “cool” is already lost.
cohen is a schlub these days, and sweet jeebus, maybe he always was — me in denial of my own inner schlub. oy. (well, at least i aint “mr highpockets” of the fucking WaPo)
December 16th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I believe that the greatest problem with Blackberry’s is that they are the preferred method of communication of people with too many tattoos and piercings. How many is too many, you ask? One!! LOL! ROTFLMAO! Did you know that when I was in grade school the teacher used to call on me when he needed someone funny like me to say something funny?
December 16th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Leaks are an important way that one part of the government can communicate with another. An assistant Cabinet secretary cannot pick up the phone and call the president. His boss won’t let him. His boss might block something the president should know. This is where leaks come in. The low-level guy leaks the information to a newspaper and the president reads about it at breakfast.
Does he really want to go there? At least until Bush is a long time out of office?
December 16th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Jeez, this reminds me of what happened when my little brother had kids about 15 years ago. He came up to me one day and said, “What ever happened to saturday morning cartoons on TV? My kids don’t watch them anymore, ever since we got cable TV there are cartoons on 24 hours a day. They don’t have to wait for saturday morning. Now they spend saturdays pestering me to PLAY with them!”
December 16th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Reading Cohen’s columns is like talking to my senile Aunt ; it’s becoming more painful. It used to be fun to mock his crazy statements in comments, but now… His assumptions are those of the ’70s, when he might have been a liberal. Now he’s just another scribbler, part litckspittle, part curmudgeon, part of a brand (the Washington Post) that is sinking to irrelevancy and unprofitablity. If they would ditch him and Broder and Will and Bloody Charlie Krauthammer, replace them with bloggers (like our esteemed host, he said, sucking up)and elevate the likes of Froomkin to the paper edition, they would have a chance. Cohen is making more lefty noises now that the Conservative thing has gone wobbly, but he’s still sounding like an antique.
Cohen should be gone given his history of sexual harassment, much less turning out crap supporting the war, dissing the French, calling for ‘lights out’ on the Scooter Libby case, or calling for cessation of teaching algebra in high school. He’s an embarrassment, no liberal, and he and his ilk are killing the Post brand.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Exactly how old is Cohen, anyway? Is he a baby boomer? Because he sounds like a baby boomer: constant nostalgia, pining for a “simpler time” that they didn’t even really experience, but saw on TV.
On behalf of Baby Boomers with brains, I apologize for the cretinous lump of cat box litter effluvia that is Richard Cohen.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
To quote Michael Keaton’s character in Night Shift, referring to the WSJ…
“No sports, no comics, no Ann Landers… what kind of paper is this?”
December 16th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Only a fool — or possibly a Frenchman — hates reading the newspaper!
December 16th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Richard Cohen, June 19, 2007:
So… politics should be performed behind closed doors, but then leaked to the press immediately? I’m confused.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
WaPo’s comic strips and leaks, though not of the kind that Cohen had in mind, are increasingly located on its editorial pages.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Interesting that Cohen thinks that the role of a newspaper is to convey coded messages between powerful people. The rest of us are supernumeraries. Well, it’s long been clear that that’s what the Post is all about.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Contrast the Cohen quote with Louis D. Brandeis, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It 92 (1914): “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
This man should not have a place in a national newspaper, much less a biweekly column…
December 16th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Also, the “leave the light out” plan sounds like a disaster in real estate or sex.
If not a kindness for his partners.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
The fact that Richard Cohen is paid to write is evidence that newspapers have far too much money to spend.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
So… politics should be performed behind closed doors, but then leaked to the press immediately? I’m confused.
You know what makes that makes sense, Andrew?
Realizing that Cohen doesn’t think of journalism – of the press covering the actions of the government – as something distinct from politics, that should happen out in the open, but as part of the “lights off” operations of politics itself.
He doesn’t think he’s supposed to be us, looking at them. He doesn’t even think he’s supposed to be a conduit of information to us, about them. He thinks he is part of them, over us.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
This is Richard Cohen. The guy who made the case that high school students don’t need to know Algebra. Right then and there, I stopped paying attention to anything else the man had to say.
Why didn’t you?
December 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I was all set to make fun of Cohen too (who so often deserves it) until I actually read his column. It’s not really that bad — the main point of the column is that Obama is rightly concerned of being trapped in a presidential bubble, and he thinks his blackberry (and the communication it engenders) will help protect him. Cohen is just suggesting that the newspaper (i.e., the press) will do a better job of bursting the bubble. That doesn’t seem so ridiculous to me: people may be as likely to suck up over the blackberry as in person, and an aggressive press can keep a president from getting *too* comfortable (certainly the lack of this has been a problem). Whether the press will actually serve this function or just return to the picayune Clinton rules is, of course, the big question that Cohen is probably incapable of addressing.
December 16th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
NATO hacks off Russia. Shouldn’t that be enough for Richard Cohen?
December 16th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
you can get Richard Cohen on a Blackberry, but you can’t get a BlackBerry on Richard Cohen.
December 17th, 2008 at 6:49 am
Exactly how old is Cohen, anyway? Is he a baby boomer? Because he sounds like a baby boomer: constant nostalgia, pining for a “simpler time” that they didn’t even really experience, but saw on TV.
That’s not baby-boomers, that’s parents. Everybody’s parents do it. Baby-boomers’ parents did it. Everyone remembers a simpler time – when we were kids. Things were simpler because we didn’t know what was going on in the grown-up world. And we hadn’t had kids, who naturally de-simplify just about everything.
Cohen has been at the WaPo a long time, possibly too long for him to have been a Boomer, but I’m not sure. I note with interest that his Wikipedia entry has no date of birth and no history on him prior to this century.
December 25th, 2008 at 10:09 am
I’m a parent, and a grandparent (I’ll be 58 in March). It’s ridiculous to stereotype older people as “out of it”.
I blogged about my new Blackberry (on the Blackberry) just last week.
January 7th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Well, not bad, dude! But this guy made it better…
January 8th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Here I call these SELF-CONFIDENT LADY!
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