James Wolcott of Vanity Fair magazine refers to Glenn Reynolds as “[a] racist-t-shirt wearing professor of Creationism at Wayback University”. (Reynolds fires back here). I confess that I don’t have much of an idea who Wolcott is, other than this quickie tongue-in-cheek bio on his site and my generally dim view of the low journalistic standards of his magazine’s political hit jobs in the last several years. But you could hardly ask for a more extreme example of East Coast snobbery than to have a “columnist on media and pop culture” dismissing a guy like Reynolds as a know-nothing flat-earther. I mean, I’m certainly no worshipper of credentials as the sole basis for valuing a man’s opinions, but Wolcott appears to fancy himself to be, by definition, Reynolds’ intellectual superior simply because Wolcott is published in a glossy New York magazine and Reynolds lives in Tennessee, ignoring the fact that Reynolds is – in addition to his prolific internet profile – a respected and extensively published tenured law professor with a degree from Yale Law School and some depth of expertise on a staggering array of subjects. What is sadder is that I suspect that that self-image is reinforced by nearly everyone Wolcott knows.
I wouldn’t want to overgeneralize, but it’s not hard to see from extended observation that there are, at a minimum, more than a few people in the media world who think precisely the way Wolcott does: that a man who has succeeded in getting paid to be a full-time journalist must have more brains and sophistication than the people who have carved out careers in other endeavors, no matter how much more educated or accomplished those people are. And, of course, that attitude is precisely how journalists often wind up making hilarious errors when they try to cover specialized areas like the law, the military, etc., where a little bit of consultation with people who actually do the stuff for a living could have set them straight.
6 thoughts on “Who The Hell is James Wolcott?”
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Why link to him, Crank? You’re only supplying him with the attention he craves. Wolcott is clearly trying to raise his blogospheric profile by taking potshots at big-name right-wing bloggers that are so manifestly mean-spirited and unfair (even, I suspect, to him – he strikes me as a rather canny individual) that their only goal is to garner attention and outrage (and an admiring liberal readership), on the theory that no publicity is bad publicity.
If you must write about this charlatan, I suggest you do so without providing a link.
Reminds me of the time that Jonah Goldberg was dismissed as insignificant by a woman who wrote for TVGuide. You can’t make this sh** up.
I had never heard of Wolcott before Mark Styne had a post-election run-in with him. Sounds like a first class a-hole.
James Wolcott is the flaming moron who cheered for the hurricanes hitting red-state Florida; apparently they deserved it for voting for Jeb and his big brother.
Andrea Harris b*tch-slapped him into next week with her snarky response.
Man, what a moron. It almost seems like something you’d see on the Onion… should I replace all instances of the colors black and white on my website because, seeing as I live in the inbred, “Ah’ll make you squal like a piggy!” Midwest, it’s obviously some deep, scaaary racial subtext?
Plus, how prejudiced is implying that one half of the nation is stupid because it has the brains not to read this stuck up, sensationalist blogging also-ran’s column in some irrelevant magazine? Does this guy have any idea how hypocritical he is?
Those of us on the right hand side of the political spectrum complain a lot about media bias, which is inarguable to my mind. But much of what looks like bias is simple laziness or ignorance-it’s far easier for reporters to cover an issue or a story the same way everybody else in the MSM does. It’s infinitely easier than doing serious research, or actually THINKING about the issues.