Monday, November 24, 2014
Thin Coates
David Carr with a kind of mea culpa in NYT today as he admits he was one of many in the media who knew or suspected that many of the tales of drugging and raping king, Bill Cosby, were true and yet did not raise the issue, or did so barely, in profiles or books about him. Most stunning to me is not Mark Whitaker and others who claim they did not have a clear view of Cosby's guilt and so copped out, but the respected Ta-Nehisi Coates who says flatly that he believed "Bill Cosby was a rapist." And yet gave him a pass.
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2 comments:
I read the article and am somewhat surprised on one hand, but not so much on the other. No matter what you think of Cosby, I'm sure "outing" him and then being proved wrong (somehow, I dunno) would have deep-sixed Coates burgeoning writing career.
On the other hand, I thought we had a real muck-raker in Coates. And he was black, which made it all the more special. But he did an Obama and turned the other cheek. Oh well, next...
Interviewed on NPR today, Coates said he got it wrong by not hitting Cosby harder in a story which mentioned the rape allegations and called for others to look into the issue. His article was about Cosby, he said, but focused on the admonishment of black youth culture by Cosby as being wrong. Coates also pointed out that he was a temp writer at the Atlantic at the time, living on a shoestring, just getting started and not in the position he's in now. Still, he did stand up and admit he could have done better.
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