Friday, April 13, 2007

The A. J. Liebling Fan Club

Will members of the Inter-Media Division please come to order? Our agenda today is a mild beef by Joe Klein of Time against high-school classmate Keith Olbermann of MSNBC for putting a colleague on “The Worst Person” list.

It’s all too inside-baseball to explain here, but Klein ends up by suggesting that “maybe you should ration The Worst Person in the World--save it for nights when there really is one.”

This recalls the advice of our Beloved Founder (whose name is in the web address of this humble blog) to George Seldes, the pre-WWII gadfly who published In Fact, a weekly newsletter exposing press shortcomings.

Maybe, Liebling suggested, during a slow period, Seldes should just send out postcards saying, “No infamy this week.”

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