Fan Mail
Note: Last week, after Scene writer Matt Pulle ridiculed some of the malcontents who populate Howard Dean’s Blog for America, he received the following in response. We asked the writer’s permission to run his name and letter on Late Edition, and he agreed—so long as we run it in its entirety.
Matt,
This is Phillip Giannikas.
I am the guy you called about two years ago and spoke to about chasing a guy who robbed him . . . Who turned out to be the wrong suspect.
In any event, I’ve read your columns with amusement over the years.
I remember the time you wrote about the sexual voyeur who was some kind of prominent person in the community. So far, fair enough. Problem was, you showed a picture of his family’s house in your publication. I thought to myself, “Well, that will do wonders for his family. What a classy thing for Pulle to do.”
I’ve read, again and again, how in your column you constantly cut down the Tennessean’s poor news coverage. And then I’ve wondered at the hypocrasy of it all as I’ve watched your publication become even more conservative than the Tennessean and more milquetoastish in its news coverage.
Dude, you are a hack. I get the sense of you as just another white boy from a middle-to-upper-middle class background who knows nothing about progressive politics (mildly “liberal” politics, yes; but “progressive” politics, no) and is just another blind, wet-behind-the-ears fool when it comes to seeing life’s real issues. Put more succinctly, you have no guiding principles.
Your latest hit-piece about Howard Dean’s blog was just another example of how much you lack any guiding principles as a journalist or as a human being.
Have you bothered to check out any of the other blogs lately? Tell me that the comments on Kerry’s blog (which is highly censored, by the way) are any more erudite or educated.
What I truly found interesting is the way that you attacked all the people who took the trouble to write to the Scene in response to Dobie’s mean-spirited and extremely inaccurate hit piece on Dean. Most of those letters were much more accurate and substantial than anything that Dobie wrote in his mean-spirited and delusional rant. It’s a wonder that you are blind to this fact.
Look, it’s clear to me that you are shilling for your disgusting boss, Bruce Dobie. Well, keep on fellating his member for him.
The Nashville Scene has truly become a joke as an “alternative paper.” But, as many Scene staffers who I have met over the past two years have confided and explained to me, that’s what happens when your boss becomes a rich man and joins the Belle Meade Country Club. (Along these lines, my friend here in Nashville refers to Dobie as a “Mercedes Benz liberal.”)
Perhaps if you’re lucky, Dobie will invite you to some of his NFocus covered events where you can meet some rich and pretty young princess from one of the “good families.”
Most of my friends (be they Dean supporters or not) have all remarked that they have very little use for the Scene these days, and that the only thing they consult it for is for film coverage and film reviews because Jim Ridley and Noel Murray are still pretty good film critics. Tell Dobie to keep it up with his attacks on progressive candidates and progressive policy positions. Pretty soon he will have alienated what few people of a truly liberal or progressive bent he still has reading his increasingly bourgois and politically irrelevant paper.
And as for you, Pulle, I have no respect for you as a journalist. You’re just another blind fool that has an increasingly third-rate paper give him regular column space for the purpose of filling it up with inconsequential scribblings.
Phillip Giannikas, Esq.
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