Criticism
In its review of Wolff's book Burn Rate, Brill's Content criticized Wolff for "apparent factual errors" and said that more than a dozen of the subjects he mentioned complained that Wolff had "invented or changed quotes" that he attributed to them.
In a 2004 cover story for The New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote that Wolff was “uninterested in the working press,” preferring to focus on “the power players—the moguls” and was "fixated on culture, style, buzz, and money, money, money.” She also noted that “the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events.” Calling his writing "a whirlwind of flourishes and tangents and asides that often stray so far from the central point that you begin to wonder whether there is a central point" she quoted one daily New York columnist thusly: “I find it nearly impossible to read his columns. They’re flabby. I don’t know what the fuck he’s trying to say.” One journalist who knew Wolff told Cottle, "He can't write. He doesn't report." Cottle subsequently called Wolff “possibly the bitchiest media big foot writing today.”
The Columbia Journalism Review criticized Wolff in 2010 when he suggested that The New York Times was aggressively covering the breaking News International phone hacking scandal as a way of attacking News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch. CJR called Wolff's analysis “pathetic”, “disgusting,” “twisted,” and based on “zero evidence.”
In 2013, Gawker.com cited Wolff as a major example of “trolling,” whereby media run stories designed solely for the purpose of outraging their consumers and thereby provoking public reaction. Gawker wrote, “Wolff is intelligent enough to be an actual, serious media critic; he's also canny enough to know that few people give a shit about serious media criticism, so he can get a lot more readers by tossing off ridiculous white wines about restaurant reservations and incendiary mansplanations; and, he's both needy and amoral enough to just, you know, insult people for attention.”
Read more about this topic: Michael Wolff (journalist)
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)