Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb tweeted out a welcome to his two recent hires, Scott Pelley and Sharyn Alphonse. Both were recently fired by CBS. Both are, of course, leftist hacks.
Yet there is something even more insidious going on. Jelani Cobb often praises a man he cites as a mentor, a man who did drugs, played with guns, and beat and “tortured” women — all while declaring those innocent of such crimes guilty. He’s a perfect representative of modern journalism’s deep corruption.
First, here’s the CJS press release:
Columbia Journalism School (CJS) is pleased to welcome two accomplished investigative reporters this fall. Award-winning journalists Sharyn Alfonsi and Scott Pelley have been appointed Journalists in Residence for the 2026–27 academic year.
The appointments are part of the CJS2030: Democracy Initiative, a pillar of Dean Jelani Cobb’s vision for the J-School’s next decade. The initiative draws on classroom training and the work of CJS centers to strengthen accountability reporting and journalism’s role in sustaining democracy.
During their residency, Alfonsi and Pelley will work closely with students, individually and as a group, through lectures, workshops and special events designed to sharpen their reporting, investigative and sourcing skills. They will also each contribute a piece to the Columbia Journalism Review. Their appointments give CJS students access to two journalists whose reporting has shaped the national conversation for decades. Alfonsi and Pelley have covered many of the defining stories of our time—from war and politics to public health, criminal justice and international affairs.
“We're both excited and honored to welcome two journalists of this caliber to our Journalist in Residence Program,” said Jelani Cobb, Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism. “Their distinguished track records in investigative reporting highlight the amazing opportunity our students will have to learn from them, and we look forward to having Sharyn and Scott with us this year.”
Maybe Pelley and Alfonsi can look into Cobb’s glorification of a violent maniac — while Cobb simultaneously condemns the innocent without evidence. In his new book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025, Cobb has high praise for a man named David Carr. Cobb met Carr in 1996, when Carr was the editor of the Washington City Paper. Carr, who went on to become a noted writer at the New York Times — He was a deep influence on Cobb.
Carr was also a monster who, by his own admission, did crack and beat and “tortured” women. In his appreciation for Carr, Cobb ignores these awful facts. Furthermore, Cobb, a New Yorker writer, is the same man who expressed moral outrage because Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh defended themselves. Cobb compared these two men to Jeffrey Epstein. For $124,000 a year (!) you can sit at Cobb’s feet and absorb his wisdom, as well as that of Pelley and Alfonsi.
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 focus on standards was evident when Cobb joined the staff of the City Paper 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 twenty-something 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 ends 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. Carr explored his violent, crackhead behavior in his 2008 memoir The Night of the Gun. Raised in Minneapolis, Carr, according to a Washington Post profile, “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.’” While an editor at the Twin Cities Reader, Carr told a colleague she had “a nice rack.”
Then there are the truly psychotic episodes. Carr beat up a girlfriend, Anna, breaking one of her ribs and tossing her off a dock. He also beat another girlfriend, Doolie, who called the police after he slapped her in the face. Carr: “I tortured her, mentally, verbally and, eventually, physically.” 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 The Night of the Gun, Carr reports that he and Anna were smoking crack the day she gave birth to their premature twins.
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 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?
In the fall of 2018, Cobb wrote piece for the New Yorker - “The Feigned Victimhood of Bill Cosby, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas.” It’s exactly what the title implies, a conflating of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, the latter then up for a seat on the Supreme Court, with Bill Cosby, who had been found guilty of drugging women and rape. Cobb:
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. He 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.
David Carr was never held responsible by the journalists who still slander Brett Kavanaugh. Whatever lesson about the importance of facts and accuracy that Carr imparted to Cobb was lost at Cobb perch at the New Yorker, which was blasted for running slanderous Kavanaugh stories that even the New York Times would not touch.
Even today Carr is deified by the same media that destroys Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. In 2019 Terry Gross of NPR rebroadcast an interview with “Fresh Air Favorite David Carr.” Gross has no time for those journalists who are accused and 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 symposium about Carr, Wemple demanded that the media start learning to apologize. Yet Wemple never brought up Carr’s violent past. Since 2016, The New York Times has offered a journalist a David Carr Fellowship. According to the Times’ website: “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. Candidates should have at least three years of experience and be eager to experiment with creative ways of storytelling through video, text, social media and other means.”
Candidates should also, like Jelani Cobb, learn how to bury the truth.
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy HotAir's conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member