When Fox News ran a three-minute video obituary of Kurt Vonnegut yesterday, many bloggers, including our colleagues at FishbowlNY, were quick to question the network’s taste and sensitivity, what with James Rosen saying things like, “By the late ’70s, Vonnegut was rich and irrelevant.” Today, Gal Beckerman uses the Columbia Journalism Review to explain the sheer mean-spiritedness of the piece in greater detail. “Challenging as it may have been for Rosen to present an appropriately complex picture of a man and an artist who happened, yes, to be a diehard liberal,” Beckerman writes, “it probably shouldn’t have rendered the portrait of failure and imbecility that Rosen delivered.”
I’ll admit, when I heard Rosen begin by declaring “Kurt Vonnegut probably wouldn’t have wanted a classically structured obituary,” my secret heart of hearts was hoping against hope that Fox was about to show us what it’s like to be unstuck in time, but no such luck. Just a long string of gratuitous swipes; really, who takes time out of an obit to mention that the deceased “failed at suicide” decades ago? And although it’s not precisely inaccurate to claim that Vonnegut “made a career” out of “conjuring” the firebombing of Dresden, it’s a rather uncharitable way of putting it. (You think Fox would say Tim LaHaye made a career out of conjuring the Second Coming?) And just so there’s no confusion about how Beckerman feels, he ends by invoking one of Vonnegut’s most famous lines to describe Rosen:
Readers of Breakfast of Champions will immediately recognize what that is…