More on David Carr

I'm neither a New York Times nor David Carr groupie, but Tom McGeveran's writeup on Carr in Capital New York caught my eye. Together with the admiring portrait of Carr by Aaron Sorkin in Interview that I referenced yesterday, McGeveran's piece makes it a good week for Carr.

Of more interest to the rest of us is that McGeveran gives a quick overview of the Times' recent history that led to what McGeveran called the "development of the Times having a superego beyond the 'daily miracle'." McGeveran lays the blame for many of the paper's travails in the past decade on former editor-in-chief Howell Raines, whose tenure from 2001-2003 McGeveran calls "Kremlinesque" (without explanation, which I, at least, needed). The response to Raines, apparently, was for the Times to become more transparent about itself.

The line from this piece that grabbed me wasn't actually from this piece. It's a line McGeveran quotes twice (and a line Carr struggles to explain at the article's close) from Carr's memoir Night of the Gun:

We all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon.

Indeed.

[UPDATE: I've been very bad at crediting recent entries. The link to the Capital New York article is courtesy of LongReads.]