kellywritershouse/Wikimedia Commons
Journalist and media critic Eric Boehlert in 2019
The shock of the death of my friend and comrade Eric Boehlert is more than I have yet been able even to assimilate. Eric was a mensch in every sense of the word. Personally, he was a model of decency, good humor, and generous instincts. Like so many of us, he was furious at the countless failings of our mainstream media, the purposeful lies of those who exploit these for the benefit of those who would destroy our liberties, our planet, and what remains of the meager protections offered to the most vulnerable among us. But unlike most of us, he not only did something about it in a fashion that often made me tired just to think about, much less to keep up with, but did so with a genial, often funny, ironic attitude that should prove a model to those of us who often find that (entirely justified) anger is getting the best of us.
For the tiniest example of what I mean, here is a tweet from Eric that, I swear, I read aloud to my partner just the other night:
One of the rituals I’ve embraced in writing this newsletter has been to wait to read Eric’s Press Run columns until after I’ve drafted my own. I did this because had I read them first, I would likely have allowed myself to be overly influenced by his observations and reporting, and I wished to avoid this. But I also knew it would be irresponsible to write almost anything about the media in any given week without knowing what Eric had uncovered and/or revealed. I can’t tell you how many times I had to throw away items because Eric had done them sooner and better; or how many items came to my readers much improved because he had noticed connections I had missed or whose significance I initially failed to understand. His never-ending string of tweets went a long way toward justifying Twitter’s existence, if such a thing is even possible.
Eric and I became friends decades ago. We worked together briefly and went to concerts and sometimes conferences together. He and his family visited mine on vacation once or twice. But mostly I experienced Eric the way his hundreds of thousands of fans and followers did: as perhaps the most tireless and relentless media critic in all of America. To be honest, I don’t know how he did it. I find watching cable TV news to be soul-destroying and have banished it from my life. But Eric appeared to catch everything and expose (or mock) it by doing so in context, a rarity in our benighted political discourse.
Eric and I did not have identical political views. He was less apt to criticize mainstream Democratic Party figures like Hillary Clinton or Chuck Schumer than I am, as well as some of their surrogates on MSNBC. Even so, it was a rare moment indeed when Eric and I did not end up in a similar political place. I make this distinction not to hold my path up as necessarily superior, but to point out that while Eric stuck to criticizing sins committed against Democrats rather than those of which its members were sometimes guilty, he never strayed from the truth. The integrity of his work speaks to the profound difference between the two sides in our political discourse and the most significant failing of the mainstream media. Eric was a Democratic Party partisan and stuck to honest, evidence-based arguments. It is literally impossible to identify a Republican Party partisan who does so, because to argue on behalf of that party is to give oneself over to lies. Never mind the racism, the homophobia, the sexism, the ethnocentrism, and the Marjorie Taylor Greene–level insanity. It’s a party built on lies. It no longer has any honest partisans. Its supporters in the media are, if they believe themselves to be journalists, by definition betraying their readers by participating in what Hannah Arendt described as the “consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth.” The very fact of the honesty and decency of Eric’s work tells us of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the mainstream media’s commitment to bothsidesism, together with the dangers it poses to the future of our democracy.
Tributes to Eric went up quickly on Wednesday. Charles Pierce wrote: “He was 57, but his spirit was decades younger and his wisdom was decades older, and that’s just the way that was, too,” and James Fallows wrote this post in his honor. But even more so, I also urge you to check out not only Eric’s wonderful Twitter feed and the back issues of Press Run columns, but also and most especially his two books: Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press.
My deepest condolences go to Eric’s wife Tracy and their children. As for the rest of us, once the shock and the pain have passed, well, let’s all try to make his memory a blessing.
So, it’s sort of official: We are going to let the planet go to hell to the point where it will become uninhabitable for hundreds of millions of people. There are many culprits in this process. Frogs do not actually allow themselves to be boiled slowly—they jump out of the water—but planets do. Being inanimate objects, they have no choice.
As The Observer’s Fiona Harvey reports: “Scientists fear that their last-ditch climate warnings are going unheeded amid international turmoil caused by the war in Ukraine, and soaring energy prices.” This is their conclusion based on the release of the third segment of the landmark scientific report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, likely its last one “to be published while there is still time to avoid the worst ravages of climate breakdown.” It is warning, Harvey writes, “that the world is not shifting quickly enough to a low-carbon economy.” Moreover, it is also regardless of the fact that “the previous instalment of the vast report—known as working group 2 of the IPCC—was published a month ago, just as Russia invaded Ukraine, and received only muted attention, despite warning of catastrophic and irreversible upheavals that can only narrowly be avoided by urgent action now.” This is obviously not going to happen. We’ve been to this movie many times before, and while each version keeps getting scarier, they are also becoming ever more predictable.
What is perhaps most depressing about the IPCC report is that just a little adjustment regarding our use of fossil fuels would go a long way toward addressing the crisis—and yet, for political reasons, this turns out to be impossible. Here again is Harvey: “The world can still hope to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown but only through a ‘now or never’ dash to a low-carbon economy and society, scientists have said in what is in effect a final warning for governments on the climate. Greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and can be nearly halved this decade, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to give the world a chance of limiting future heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels … The final cost of doing so will be minimal, amounting to just a few percent of global GDP by mid-century, though it will require a massive effort by governments, businesses and individuals.”
In fact, the opposite is happening. “Soaring energy prices and the war in Ukraine have prompted governments to rethink their energy policies. Many countries—including the US, the UK and the EU—are considering ramping up fossil fuels as part of their response.” There are countless culprits in this story. You (and I) are likely among them. But I have to agree with Joe Biden that, in this context, as in so many others, while it may be a close contest with say, the Koch brothers, it is Rupert Murdoch who in this, as in so many other contexts, is the “most dangerous man in the world.” If you want to know why, I suggest you read Eric Boehlert on “The Murdoch Cancer,” or Eric Boehlert on “How Rupert Murdoch Pushed Australia Into a Climate Change Retreat,” or yours truly, quoting Eric Boehlert, on “The Wall Street Journal Riddle.” Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.
I leave you with this video of one of the two nights in March 2009 when Eric Clapton joined the Allman Brothers at the Beacon Theatre for an incredible 54-minute set. It was already a wonderful memory for me, but it will now always be both sadder and sweeter because I got to share it with my friend and comrade Eric Boehlert.
