Nick Sylvester, Traditionalist

Jayson Blair, Judith Miller, and Stephen Glass are starting to look like trendsetters now, rather than the abominations that they are. Joining their sad parade a couple of weeks ago was the annoying Nick Sylvester of the Village Voice and Pitchfork Media. It turns out that Sylvester was caught fabricating the details of a recently published article in the Voice and has been suspended indefinitely. Whereas the revelations of Glass' or Blair's misdeeds earned them immediate dismissals, dearest Nicky has not been fired yet by the Voice--although I doubt we will see him doing the Judith Miller perp walk accompanied by Voice publisher Michael Cohen or Pitchfork chief Ryan Schreiber.

Sylvester's most notable quality as a writer was his snideness. His music reviews for both the Voice and Pitchfork were shallow and lacked a real understanding of music. Too often he was fooled by a thick presskit, as this review of woozy and pretentious electro schmucks Excepter demonstrates. He would also disparage bands whose sound was too sophisticated for his ear while simultaneously passing himself off as a knowledgeable musician, as this review of Deerhoof shows. His visibility in the world of music criticism was considerable, however--and with dual jobs toiling for the Voice and Pitchfork he was approaching something close to critical ubiquity. Remembering, of course, that a music critic's job for a major publication like the Voice consists of being given free music and seeing live shows for free, it would seem that Sylvester's life was fairly set. Destiny intervened, according to some rumors, when his editor began to groom him as his protege journalist; and Nick's job began requiring more copy than mere review pieces as he was assigned full columns.

He choked in the face of that pressure and admitted to fabricating some details in his last story for the Voice, which now throws suspicious light upon his entire journalistic output. But as the numbers of fakers have increased in the American press, it appears that the punishments for them have disappeared. Jayson Blair got to write a book about his experiences, mysteriously equating his lying and absence of ethics with a slave battling against slavery, while Stephen Glass received the book and movie treatment for his own journalistic corruptions. And let's not forget the new breed of journalist/propagandist fakers on the rise, exemplified by former NY Times reporter Judith Miller, Ann Coulter, Armstrong Williams, or any of the assholes who work for Fox "News"--they remain unpunished for their participation in spreading the lies that took the US into war with Iraq, along with helping to quash any public discussion of the Bush administration's conduct on 9-11 itself. Tolerance for embellishment seems to be rising, and everyone from the last two presidents on down is willing to make reality as subjective as it can possibly be.

So little Nick Sylvester's crimes certainly pale in comparison with these other liars. But when an American journalist is caught fabricating their work, it usually ends up opening up a profitable new life for them. As he follows in the footsteps of those giants who came before him, he might be able to console himself with that thought. Life begins after getting caught, Nicky Boy.