I sometimes send e-mails
I sometimes send e-mails
Nothing is likely to contain the spread of the media's dishonesty at this point, but those who produce and distribute lies deserve to experience stark shame and embarrassment
Yesterday afternoon, I sent an e-mail to The New York Times using the address provided on the website’s “Contact Us” page under “Report a Correction or Share Feedback.” Having unspooled enough words here about the conduct of a single malignant columnist to create the equivalent of a religious tract, I decided it was time to augment these Beck of the Pack posts by expressing my distaste formally and directly.
Kevin Beck <kemibe@gmail.com>
Mon, Nov 8, 3:59 PM
to nytnews@nytimes.com
To: Lindsay Crouse
cc: Glyn Peterson
Re: Rampant, unchecked dishonesty in the NYT
Dear Ms. Crouse,
I'm afraid your New York Times columns are singularly terrible. They are relentlessly self-referential, and you are more boring than you could possibly believe.
My concern today, however, is not quality, but integrity. And this concern is directed almost as much at one of your alleged fact-checkers, Glyn Peterson, as it is at you, since Ms. Peterson is plainly as deviant, negligent, or both as you and everyone else at the ghastly 2021 incarnation of the NYT.
One of your recent attempted columns includes the sentence "It felt like I was lying" in the first paragraph. We both know why such a sense likely pervades many of your waking moments.
I wrote for the standard running magazines and their online counterparts for a long time, before they became sick jokes, and a couple of running-related books have my name on the cover. These achievements are nothing to be unusually proud of, but they establish that I have valued both competitive running and writing about competitive running for too long to stand by as someone occupying a job at a laughable but still-prominent media outlet regularly unleashes dishonest, self-absorbed, and often overtly destructive nonsense.
As you may be aware thanks to endless vanity Googling or other means, I now operate a Substack devoted largely to reviewing the work of distance-running figures who commit the sort of journalistic malfeasance upon which you have built your entire sad career. Although you and your work are stultifying, and bland to the point of inspiring narcosis, your lying is too blatant to be ignored. As a result, you're a regular feature in my articles. the factuality of which have not been disputed by anyone.
You wrote a column about yourself in March that transgressed your usual sloppiness and hyperbole and represented a complete fabrication. That's not an accusation; it's a fact. And while that's an unusually brazen example of your willful dereliction of duty, it's one of too many too list here.
I'm curious what, if anything, you have to say about this very public, obviously premeditated lie. I know you can't try to claim the story was true; I'm just wondering if you'll answer at all. But both your Strava account and your Twitter feed show runs you completed while claiming to have been completely idle, and the entire charade was assembled with a 10-year-old's level of intellectual sophistication.
If you choose to reply, understand that I'll post the response on my blog, where I will also be posting this letter (partly so that you can't go off bragging about having a stalker). If you don't reply, I'll note that on my site as well and return to deconstructing your hoarse and pathetic efforts to emit something profound in a newspaper that charges readers money to read lies.
Frankly, you and Ms. Peterson deserve to be fired for a combination of blithering incompetence and ethical violations. Were the NYT still in the news-gathering business, you'd be unemployable. But it isn't, so you should count yourself as fortunate that being publicly shamed by a reader is likely the worst consequence you'll face for your active dereliction of duty. But if you continue lying or allowing unaddressed lies to sit live on the Internet, I will continue to deride your work by way of publicly demanding a better product from the NYT and the media in general than the worthless dreck you churn out on the job and promote on social media.
Sincerely,
Kevin M. Beck
P.S. Congratulations on crowing about getting into the elite field at the New York City Marathon despite a pedestrian—and aging—personal best of 2:53, then running 3:39 in Vaporflys, a shoe made by a company you allegedly detest. This encapsulates all anyone needs to know about the flesh-and-blood cartoon character dubbed Lindsay Crouse. A normal person would feel humbled or even humiliated; in your world, this is just how people become "successful.”
Although Lindsay Crouse offers every cardinal sign of being a garden-variety bad human being, I bear no personal animus toward her or anyone else at the New York Times. I’ve thankfully never met her, and she’s never acknowledged my posts or other work, much less made me a target; she’s too focused on interacting with other mutually supportive dirtbags in the online joggersphere to stoop to that.
But I categorically deny media outlets the option of publishing blatantly dishonest material pushback-free—especially those outlets formerly in the business of reporting news, and extra-especially when they charge readers money for the honor of being lied to, day after day.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have done this sort of thing despite the idea being both justifiable and tempting; I was hoping against reason that blistering invective alone might compel the worst of the brazenly incompetent and corrupt media and media-adjacent clowns I’ve written about to curtail the worst of their dark social fantasies, truth-shredding, and other malfeasance, or at least limit that crap to their social-media accounts. I wasn’t out to try to seriously burn anyone professionally.
Now, I think it would be best if people like Crouse were fired, whether this outcome results merely in their resurfacing at other outlets to continue the same unethical behavior or whether it shifts their addresses to cardboard boxes outside big-city bus stations. (Most likely, these precious snowflakes’ parents would continue paying their rent without an audible hiccup.)
I’m not certain Crouse or Peterson will even see my e-mail, let alone publicly acknowledge it. I’ve been off social media for months and have no plans to return. But most of my readers know where to find their social accounts and how to make them aware of this post. If they ignore you, that’s admitting to, and augmenting, their moral degeneracy. If they block you, ditto. If Crouse’s fairytale “comeback” column is silently amended or even deleted from the NYT website, that will be the most flagrant tacit acknowledgments of guilt anyone can summon.
These “responses”—which may, of course, occur in combination—will just feed my desire to belittle and punish the bad actors. But none of them, by themselves, will signal any intention to change. And I don’t expect any of these flat-out, knee-walking twats to change anything, because they care solely about themselves.
Crouse, all feeble mind and broken moral compass, has been failing upward for years; as nutty as it may be, she also has momentum on her side. She may be the most audacious liar and issue-distorter in the running media, but she’s in the majority.
If some bozo from a rich family hates things about herself such as her uncooperatively large derriere or slow-moving feet, well, those are indeed horrible problems to deal with, maybe even life-threatening ones. But using a news outlet as a platform for screeching about these things while posing as a reporter and feigning a concern for others is not, and never will be, remotely acceptable.