Is David Carr a Truth Junkie? -- New York Magazine

What Do Crack Cocaine and Journalism Have in Common?

With Woody Harrelson at Sundance in January 2008.

(Photo: Courtesy of David Carr)

Ten years ago, the Times wouldn’t have considered hiring an alt-freak like David Carr. Forget about his personal history: Professionally, he’s a throwback, more gonzo than Ivy League, and as talented as he was, he’d never worked at a daily paper. What suddenly qualified him to write for the Times about … business? And what, for that matter, made a job at the Times appealing to David? As editor of both the Twin Cities Reader and the Washington City Paper, he’d spent much of his time tossing darts at the mainstream media. He’d worked briefly at a dot-com (Inside, where Andersen employed him), and then for New York and The Atlantic Monthly. But suddenly David bolted for the Times. At the beginning, whenever I ran into any of his new colleagues, they’d all say the same thing: That guy is weird. The first time I visited him there, we spent almost all our time standing on the smoking deck, hanging with Jayson Blair and Lynette Holloway, two people about as estranged from the Times company as you could get (even at that time, as smokers and African-Americans). Jayson, too, was a coke addict in recovery. His career took a slightly different trajectory.

David and I take the elevator up to the culture floor and stop by his desk. In his in-box, there’s a note from Scott Rudin, the film producer, complaining about his column on independent cinema. “He tells me I’m a gullible nitwit,” David says. “There’s a case to be made.”

But here’s the truth of the matter: David loves this shit. He loves getting notes from Scott Rudin, loves getting those 450 e-mails, loves having defendable real estate in the Monday paper. One of the striking things about David’s description of crack in The Night of the Gun is the sense of omnipotence he associates with it—how it makes you “feel like the lord of all you survey.” When he left New York Magazine for the Times, he told me that one of the main reasons was that he wanted more juice, wanted people to quarrel with him and fear him and read him widely and return his calls in five minutes flat.

We have lunch, then head off to a meeting with the “Web fairies,” as David likes to call them, who’ve been designing the Website for The Night of the Gun. “God, that’s so pretty,” he says, admiring their handiwork. And it is. They’ve assembled a great-looking collage of photos and documents and Errol Morris–like video clips. David watches them, adds notes. Then he realizes there’s a potential conflict of interest chug-a-lugging toward him: The Times Magazine is going to want some of this stuff for its own Website. “Have we discussed issues of hosting?” he asks the fairies. “I mean, we’re supposedly all one family, and we have what they want … ”

“Give them as little as possible,” says one of the fairies.

David shakes his head. “They’ll eat me alive.”

The surprising thing about David’s transition to the Times, in the end, isn’t that the institution has managed to absorb him. It’s that he’s managed to absorb the institution as much as he has. He really wants to be a loyal company man. Which makes sense—as one of seven kids, he has a sense of family loyalty, and as a guy in recovery, he probably appreciates the ritual and structure. Most profoundly, The Night of the Gun shows that journalism is the thing that most helped David climb out of his hellhole, apart from his daughters. When the Times offer came along, David says, he sat before the assistant managing editor, Al Siegal, swearing he understood that “the needs of the many outrank the needs of the one.”

“It’s interesting,” says Sam Sifton, the Times culture editor. “When you come to the paper from a nontraditional background, as David did, you’ve got to make a choice when you walk through the door: Do you buck convention and play the hot dog, or do you sit down, respect the institution, and work your ass off?” David, he argues, has done the latter. “You look at that guy,” he says, “and he is, in his own way, a perfect Timesman.”

When David talks about the Times, he talks about it with real love and reverence. (“I think it’s one of humankind’s greatest institutions,” he tells me.) But how long could a guy like David actually sustain a life in a gray flannel suit? It’s hard not to notice the timing: In 2002, he went to work at the Times. In 2002, he fell off the wagon. “I had some issues of adjustment going to work there,” he acknowledges. “In the old building, there was sorta something that lived in the elevators. And let’s just say it wasn’t completely life-affirming.” He thinks. “I guess I also felt as if I’d picked up my dad’s briefcase, a briefcase full of adult concerns and adult responsibilities—and shouldn’t somebody more qualified have that briefcase?”