Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025

by Jelani Cobb

One World

496 pps., $32.00

In his new book, Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025, Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb has high praise for late New York Times columnist David Carr. Cobb met Carr in 1996, when Carr was the editor of the Washington City Paper, and writes that Carr had a deep influence on him.

Carr was also a crack addict who, by his own admission, “was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke.” In his appreciation for Carr, Cobb downplays his awful backstory. It’s worth remembering that Cobb, a New Yorker magazine writer, is the same man who expressed moral outrage because Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh defended themselves against dubious sexual assault allegations by Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, respectively. Cobb compared the two Supreme Court justices to Jeffrey Epstein.

In short, Jelani Cobb celebrates men who maul and torture women while condemning innocent men who defend themselves. He’s kind of a perfect exemplar of modern American journalism. For $124,000 a year you can sit at his feet and absorb his wisdom.

First, let’s turn to Carr and the role he played in Cobb’s life. In Three or More is a Riot, Cobb describes the relationship:

As a media reporter for The New York Times and a central figure in a 2011 documentary about the paper, Page One, [Carr] became a figure of note, a fittingly meta development for the age. Yet he never stopped being a newsman in the old mold: he didn’t develop a brand; he built a reputation. At the City Paper, he was the editor every young writer should hope to encounter: as harsh as he was forgiving, accessible, with an outlook that could be described as jaded idealism. He was allergic to euphemism and a believer that journalism was the art of curating minutiae. He also had one of the most valuable attributes a writer can claim—an ability to withhold personal judgment. Maybe that openness was always part of his disposition, but if you read The Night of the Gun, his memoir about his harrowing years as a crack addict in Minnesota, you got the impression that his reluctance to judge others was a product of a hard-won understanding of human fallibility, beginning with his own. That world-weary outward expression was not an affect—if he hadn’t seen it all, he’d at least witnessed enough to issue some preliminary findings, and, from that vantage point, had accumulated a good deal of sympathy for others. What made him more than simply a humbled former user, however, was the fact that he didn’t confuse his unwillingness to judge with an absence of standards. 

That defense of standards was evident when Cobb joined the City Paper’s staff in 1996:

During one early editorial meeting at the City Paper, Carr walked in, sat down, and matter-of-factly explained that we’d embarrassed ourselves with the previous issue. He pointed to our exact failings and demanded explanations—very specific explanations—for how we planned to avoid embarrassing ourselves in the future. I started at the paper very much afflicted with the insufferable omniscience of many twentysomething writers. I came out of one of Carr’s legendarily scalding critiques—of a story in which I’d gotten facts wrong—wanting to pack my byline into a lead-lined case and slip out the back door. But a few days later he was offering helpful suggestions for my next story.

Cobb finishes with this:

After leaving the City Paper, I didn’t maintain close contact with Carr, but when I’d written myself into a corner or found myself intimidated by an assignment, I frequently fell back upon what I’d learned from him. In one of his more notable generosities back in Washington, he purchased copies of Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel for the entire staff. He signed mine, “To Jelani, This will show you the way.” Not quite. That was a distinction that belonged largely to him.

High praise. In his 2008 memoir The Night of the Gun, David Carr had confessed his violent, crackhead behavior during his earlier life in his hometown of Minneapolis. According to a Washington Post profile,

Carr was fired from a series of jobs in Minneapolis as his life became consumed by coke snorting and dealing (not to mention dropping acid) while he checked in and out of rehab centers and kept getting arrested. His personal life was nothing to brag about, and he doesn’t: “My duplicity around women was towering and chronic. I conned and manipulated myself into their beds and then treated them as human jewelry, something to be worn for effect.”

Then there are the truly psychotic episodes. In The Night of the Gun, Carr describes beating up a girlfriend, Anna, breaking one of her ribs and tossing her off a dock. He and Anna were smoking crack the day she gave birth to their premature twins. He also beat another girlfriend, Doolie, who called the police after he slapped her in the face. “I tortured her, mentally, verbally and, eventually, physically,” he wrote. When warned that detailing such repulsive behavior could ruin his career, Carr said, “I just thought if I tried to sandpaper some corners, the whole thing would fall apart.”

In his 2008 New York Times review of The Night of the Gun, Bruce Handy, a writer for Vanity Fair, was shocked by Carr’s violence toward women—and by Carr’s unwillingness to truly examine where his rage came from: 

Addicts still have psyches, though, and Carr seems either unwilling or uninterested in exploring his and others’—and this to me is the book’s Achilles’ heel. Of his first, nonsober marriage, he writes, “No one can really explain why I married her, including me.” Of a subsequent and sometimes violent relationship, he notes, “part of the reason I was so frantic, so brutal, was that I was obsessed with her.” That’s almost a tautology. And what’s with hitting women? Carr presents this as another aspect of his coke-fueled mania, but plenty of crackheads don’t smack their wives and girlfriends. Where does Carr’s anger come from?

I experienced Carr’s rage once. It was in 1998, when he was the editor of Washington City Paper and I was a freelancer. It’s true that Carr was a good editor—but he was also nuts. If something angered him, he would call and scream incoherently over the phone. Carr had insulted another freelancer I knew during an editorial disagreement, prompting her husband to show up to the newspaper’s offices to confront Carr in person. I soon decamped for the New York Press, which was run by a much more stable crew.

Cobb’s 2018 piece for the New Yorker, “The Feigned Victimhood of Bill Cosby, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas,” was a dishonest conflation of the accusations against Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, the latter then up for a seat on the Supreme Court, with the criminal actions of the disgraced comedian Bill Cosby, who had been found guilty of drugging women and rape. Cobb wrote:

If Kavanaugh ascends to the Supreme Court without a formal investigation into the accusations made against him (all of which he has denied), it will be, in part, because a black man established a model for how best to present oneself as a victim in public. This is a form of interracial unity that the country could do without. Kavanaugh cannot fall back on a nightmare history of recreational murder, but there is some fraternal recognition of a shared plight (Cosby’s prison sentence notwithstanding). Cosby and Kavanaugh are twin exemplars of a kind of amoral amnesty. It is granted to men of great talent and wealth and to those born to men who possess either talent or wealth. The outrage on their behalf is really disdain for the idea that what has been sold as a form of lifetime immunity has become a conditional one. Cosby’s precipitous fall is Exhibit A in this transition.

…[Cosby] inflicted this trauma at least sixty times over. There is no accounting for the mechanisms of deflection or rationalization that allowed him to behave in this way while simultaneously denouncing others for far smaller concerns, like what they choose to name their children. He might not ever do what he has demanded of so many others—take responsibility—but he can no longer avoid being held responsible.

What separates Bill Cosby and David Carr from Brett Kavanaugh is that Bill Cosby and David Carr actually assaulted women, while the flimsy allegations against Kavanaugh were a political hit job with no basis in reality. But David Carr, as a prominent member of the media establishment, was never held responsible by the journalists who heaped praise on him at his death in 2015. Many of these same journalists defamed Kavanaugh and have never apologized for it. Whatever lessons about facts and accuracy that Cobb purportedly learned form Carr were apparently forgotten by the time Cobb landed on his perch at the New Yorker, which ran libelous Kavanaugh stories that even The New York Times would not touch.

Even today, Carr is deified by the same media that defamed Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. In 2019, Terry Gross, the host of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program rebroadcast an interview with “Fresh Air Favorite David Carr.” Gross has no time for journalists like me, who were accused during the Kavanaugh hit job and who are innocent. Erik Wemple, a journalist who also worked with Carr at the City Paper, is now a media critic at The New York Times. In a journalism symposium last year during which Carr was lauded, Wemple demanded that the media start learning to apologize when they get things wrong. Yet Wemple never brought up Carr’s violent past.

Since 2016, The New York Times has even offered a David Carr Fellowship to promising journalists. “The fellowship is an opportunity for a journalist still fairly early in his or her career to build upon David’s commitment to holding power accountable and telling engaging, deeply reported stories,” according to the Times’ website. If they want to succeed in America’s mainstream media industry, they should also, like Jelani Cobb, learn how to bury the truth.