News David Carr, Times Critic and Champion of Media, Dies at 58

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David Carr, a writer who wriggled away from the demon of drug addiction to become a name-brand media columnist at The New York Times, and the star of ?Page One,? a documentary about the newspaper, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 58.

Mr. Carr collapsed in The Times newsroom, where he was found shortly before 9 p.m. He was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Earlier in the evening, he moderated a panel discussion about the film ?Citizenfour? with its principal subject, Edward J. Snowden; the film?s director, Laura Poitras; and Glenn Greenwald, a journalist.


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Mr. Carr wrote about cultural subjects for The Times; he initiated the feature known as The Carpetbagger, a regular report on the news and nonsense from the red carpet during awards season. He championed offbeat movies like ?Juno,? with Ellen Page, and he interviewed stars both enduring and evanescent ? Woody Harrelson, Neil Young, Michael Cera. More recently, however, he was best known for The Media Equation, a Monday column in The Times that analyzed news and developments in publishing, television, social media ? for which he was an early evangelist ? and other mass communications platforms. His plainspoken style was sometimes blunt, and searingly honest about himself. The effect was both folksy and sophisticated, a voice from a shrewd and well-informed skeptic.

?We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it,? he wrote on Monday in the wake of revelations that the NBC anchor Brian Williams had lied about being in a helicopter under fire in Iraq in 2003.

?That?s why, when the forces of man or Mother Nature whip up chaos, both broadcast and cable news outlets are compelled to ship the whole heaving apparatus to far-flung parts of the globe, with an anchor as the flag bearer. We want our anchors to be everywhere, to be impossibly famous, globe-trotting, hilarious, down-to-earth, and above all, trustworthy. It?s a job description that no one can match.?

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