Philip Gourevitch took to the New Yorker blog yesterday to publish some words about the Germanwings crash. The resulting blog post is very bad—so bad it is worth taking as a case study in how not to do aggregation.

Gourevitch is an accomplished journalist who has been all over the world and learned about many things, as his New Yorker writer biography attests:

He has travelled extensively for the magazine, reporting from Africa, Asia, Europe, and across the United States. He has written about the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia, about the dictatorships of Mobutu Sese Seko, in Congo, and Robert Mugabe, in Zimbabwe, about the Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka, about Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, in France, and about the American soldiers who served at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq.

Here is what Philip Gourevitch does not know anything about: Germanwings Flight 9525 or its co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz.

The casual reader of his blog post might miss that. Gourevitch writes vividly of the scene inside the airplane, "a god-awful eternity, especially after the captain began knocking, then shouting, then pounding at the barred cockpit door":

In the final moments before annihilation, the recorder registered the hammering of the captain's fists and feet against the door, the screams of passengers, and the quiet, steady rhythm of Lubitz's last breaths.

The horror. It's all there in the sound of Lubitz breathing. The wind of life, the wind of death. That steady soughing tells us all that we know so far, and all that we don't yet—and may never—know

The horror. Period. It's all there—all where? In the sound of Lubitz breathing, a sound that Philip Gourevitch has not heard. The wind of life, the wind of death, the wind that the investigators listened to and told reporters about, so that the reporters could write about it in the newspapers, so that Gourevitch could read about it when everyone else did.

By rendering this from just this side of the eye or ear of God, Gourevitch is being a bad blogger. Instead of compressing the material, he's inflating it. The knocking, shouting, pounding captain in the first paragraph and the hammering captain in the second paragraph are the same meager thirdhand fact, repeated twice to sound more authoritative. Likewise the "quiet steady rhythm of Lubitz's last breaths" and "the steady soughing." Soughing. The plane "flying down, down out of the sky, down into the mountains, down into death"—yes, that's what a crash is: Plane go down, out of sky, hit ground, people die. Why 14 words for it instead of one? Because the writer has nothing to say.

It's vamping. Eventually, when the facts run out, Gourevitch drags Shakespeare into it, quoting Richard III's meditation on conscience and villainy. Perhaps Lubitz went into the mountain because of the darkness of the human soul. Or maybe—I'm guessing here—he had a pure psychotic break and was trying to knock loose the transmitter that They had put inside his skull. Nobody knows!

All that Gourevitch is really equipped to say, under his yards and yards of purple brocade, is that an airplane crash is a horrible thing. At least, that's all his text says. His subtext is rather worse. Of Lubitz, Gourevitch writes:

Assuming, for now, that Robin has got the story right, Lubitz's victims—high-school students and opera stars, vacationers and business commuters, young lovers and old married couples, families and solitary travellers, citizens from at least fifteen countries—meant nothing to him. They could have been any of us, anywhere—whoever flies or rides a train or takes a bus or in any way entrusts her life to strangers, as we all must regularly and routinely to get through this world.

This proposition, that the 149 people who died on the plane were reduced to an impersonal abstraction, may or may not have been true for Lubitz. It's certainly true for Gourevitch.

[Photograph via Getty]

Contact the author at scocca@gawker.com.