Media critic James Ledbetter dies at 60

November 8, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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MANHATTAN — FORMER MEDIA CRITIC JAMES LEDBETTER, who was once the speechwriter for then-Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, died last week in his Manhattan home at 60, reports the New York Times. Ledbetter was a media critic who wrote the Press Clips column for The Village Voice in the 1990s, led Inc. Magazine as editor-in-chief and started an online financial technology newsletter. Ledbetter became District Attorney Holtzman’s speechwriter after graduating from Yale in 1986 with a baccalaureate degree in the philosophy of history. He also wrote for the New Democracy Project, a liberal think tank. He was an editor at Seven Days magazine and a media critic at The New York Observer. Ledbetter became a widely-respected journalist, working for several organizations during his career. Among them was a stint as New York bureau chief for The Industry Standard, which billed itself as “the Newsmagazine of the Internet Economy,” but which was short-lived due to an economic downturn.

An obituary of Ledbetter in Inc. Magazine recalled that during his senior year at Yale, he wrote an investigative cover story for the student magazine The New Journal about the recently formed right-wing group Accuracy in Academia (AIA), which aimed to identity leftist professors and “weed out 10,000 known Marxists” from college campuses in the U.S. He got his chance after the group’s president mistakenly thought that Ledbetter had called to join AIA and serve as Yale’s contact.

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