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Following last week’s nationwide shitstorm over its making-fun-of-the-Pope’s-upcoming-death cover story, the NYC alt-weekly New York Press returned this week with tons of angry letters, a denunciation of author Matt Taibbi by the paper’s founder/columnist Russ “Mugger” Smith, and a response by Taibbi himself.

Taibbi admits that the Pope-mocking piece was “written in the waning hours of a Vicodin haze the previous Saturday morning” (I assumed it was probably some stronger drug); thankfully, he doesn’t attempt to pass himself off as a First Amendment martyr, instead admitting that

“the only accurate metaphor to describe what happened to the paper last week was stepping in shit. The shit was there, and we stepped in it of our own volition. It was a joint effort, between us and the shit.”

Now hopefully Taibbi is prepared to lie in that shit; he is the journalist who, after all, once vowed to eat his own feces if Jets receiver Curtis Conway scored a touchdown on the Patriots’ Ty Law in a 2003 game (he didn’t).

Taibbi then explains that the piece was written as a reaction to the unanimity of opinion often seen among pundits, and "the 197 consecutive fucking hours of Pope funeral coverage on cable we all know is coming very soon." Fair enough- but how the hell does his stupid, totally unfunny article prove his point? Taibbi, who has been very funny in the past, sounds like a 12-year-old, trying to shock without really having anything to say.

Karol, in a post the other day, shared my sentiments exactly: Four or five years ago, New York Press was GREAT- probably the best thing I read every week, a journal that greatly assisted in my introduction both to wide-ranging political views, and to New York itself. They ran such disparate writers as former editor John Strausbaugh, historian William Bryk, Christopher Caldwell, Taki, J.T. Leroy, Alexander Cockburn, Amy Sohn, Toby Young, and numerous others- all fascinating, all unique, all throught-provoking, and all long-gone from the paper.

In their place, the Press has been regularly running such writers as the erratic Taibbi, the apparently insane Mark Ames (who once called for working-class Americans to become suicide bombers), ‘60s dinosaur Paul Krassner, and the inexplicably published local political gadfly Christopher Brodeur, the guy who used to always get arrested for yelling at Giuliani in press conferences, who now authors a weekly cartoon where he calls for journalists to be arrested. Not exactly a stellar lineup, especially since nothing any of them has ever written would be out of place in the Press’ erstwhile blood foe, The Village Voice.

The paper even ran a group blog, the Daily Billboard, which was around well before blogs were popular, and then inexplicably killed it just as it was building momentum (I wrote for this blog for several months). The only top writers still around from back then are Jim Knipfel, and the two film critics- mad genius Armond White and the equally solid Matt Zoller Seitz.

Whoever the new editor is, I’d like to see the Press start to tap into their old format- smarter writers, more diversity of opinion, and less of this “iconoclasm for iconoclasm’s sake, even if it’s not funny” nonsense that’s been the hallmark of the Koyen/Zaitchik/Taibbi era. Who’s with me here?

(One writer who won’t be returning, however, is the truly vile Alan Cabal, a serial Israel-basher and Holocaust denier who spent years soiling NYP’s otherwise fine pages, and has written in to request removal from the masthead. Good riddance, I say; for a guy who once wrote about attending a Holocaust-revisionism conference in Beirut, it’s a bit hypocritical of him to resign over the Pope article. It will be a fine legacy for Koyen as editor that the last thing he ever wrote in NYP was a “fuck you” response to Cabal, in which he called him “an over-the-hill, anti-Semitic, paranoid, talentless Thompson wanna-be who's seen his glory days fade into the past. Glory days that never were, actually.”)

Posted by Stephen Silver at March 10, 2005 01:44 AM