Wine Spectator Pokes At Hesser, Bruni

[Harry Covére]

Hesser is no stranger to the corrections page.

[Pan]

Interesting article. Many excerpts could be commented on, but perhaps this is the most interesting:

Asimov's appointment follows the Times' tradition of seeking expertise and experience in its critics. Bruni's appointment appears to take the paper in a different direction. Some industry veterans view it as an implicit admission that the Times' own food writers are too caught up in the restaurant industry to achieve the anonymity, objectivity and fairness the position demands.

Bruni won't have much anonymity, as his picture is available on the Internet. But the rest of the remarks have been seen already on threads on this site.

[Fat Guy]

Although this is a well-constructed and effective piece of criticism, had I been in the Wine Spectator's position I'd have let well enough alone. This just feels like revenge for Hesser's attack on the Wine Spectator awards. I'm particularly surprised to see Tom Matthews embracing the anonymity religion, at least implicitly, in the above-quoted paragraph. I've long been under the impression that Wine Spectator's reviewers (including Tom Matthews) purposely do not adhere to an anonymity policy, and indeed reject such policies as silly. Tom Matthews's excellent, objective, and fair reviews in the Wine Spectator are some of the best evidence of how non-anonymous reviews can easily be better than anonymous ones.

[mongo_jones]

that's some beard on the dude in the wine-spectator article. looks like tim curry had a bad accident with grease-paint.

[Bux]

News, not unlike photograhs and statistics, can be deceiving to the viewer, particularly one who doesn't focus on the issues. That the announcement of Bruni as the new restaurant reviewer follows criticism of Hesser's reviews is pretty coincidental. Ms. Hesser was never presented as a possible permanent choice. The NY Times was following it's customary practice of having a staff member as an interim reviewer before a new reviewer was announced. By and large, the Times seems to have gone outside the paper for its new critic and twice in a row it's gone outside the world of culinary journalism for the new reviewer. While I've been very critical of the lack of enthusiam for restaurant dining Grimes brought with him, there's a tradition of great culinary journalism coming from news journalists. The contributions of Waverly Root and AJ Liebling alone will have editors thinking about discovering the next great voice. France may not be what it was to Root and Liebling and journalists may not be what Root and Liebling were, but we tend to live in hope of selectively repeating history.

My point is that had Ms. Hesser's reviews been met with nothing but positive criticism, we'd still be reading about a replacement. I say this as someone who hasn't been fond of recent reviews, but let's understand that Hesser was always a temporary appointee. Another point I'd make is that the Wine Spectator found this all newsworthy had less to do with the inherent abilities of the individuals involved or their talents, but the fact that appointments at the NY Times are news. As noted in the article the position of restaurant reviewer at the Times, "is widely considered the most important position in American restaurant reviewing."

With that in mind, it's not unreasonable that even a temporary reviewer might be subject to scrutiny of her judgment in terms of taste in food and journalistic ethics. I don't know how often one might expect to find corrections printed in reference to any one journalist's articles. I wonder if 16 in the space of less than 7 years is abnormal. My own sense has been that she's young and inexperienced and been very unaware of what she doesn't know and that earlier, in particular, that's been evidenced by erroneous assumptions in her articles. Those assumptions don't always show up as corrections. I don't know what's better or worse, journalists uncovering each other's faults or helping each other bury past lapses. There are allegations in the Spectator article that may not be in the best reporting traditions, but there's also an interesting story as long as one bears in mind the Spectator's own issues.

I completely disagree that Bruni's selection is a departure for the Times as I noted above. Almost everyone who buys or reads the Wine Spectator has some interest in wine and food. That's hardly true for those who buy the NY Times and apparently that's not lost on the editors at the Times as evidenced by the remark by Barbara Graustark, editor of the Times' Style department.