Can The New York Times Tolerate A Conservative?
After a rocky year, conservative columnist William Kristol is leaving the opinion page of the New York Times. Kristol was a lightening rod for the left, who consider (with justification) the Times to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of their ideological movement.
That claim of ideological turf is exactly what begs the question of whether any conservative writer at the times would be tolerated by the left any more than Kristol was. In many ways, Kristol’s intermittent attention to the job and simplistic style of presenting assertions rather than analysis made him easy to criticize. But the current left is not known for its tolerance of dissenting opinions no matter how moderate or well-analyzed. And it seems unlikely that any conservative writer would be welcomed into the fevered far-left halls of Krugman and Dowd without being stereotyped ad villified to the point of demonization.
Michael Calderone presents some options for conservative additions to the Times op-ed page. I leave to the reader the entertaining exercise of imagining the reaction of the Kos Krowd and HuffPo to any of the names on his list. As the New York Times flirts with bankruptcy due to declining readership and ad revenues, does anyone really think they are going to alienate the ideological diehards that constitute their most loyal readership? I predict that the conservative opinion slot will be deemed an expendable budget line by the Times‘ ownership.
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Tolerated? I’m guessing you’ve forgotten about William Safire’s famous and lengthy tenure? And what about David Brooks TWO columns per week? Thomas Friedman isn’t exactly a “wholly-owned subsidiary” either.
No, the reason Kristol isn’t around anymore is he was a poor columnist and everybody realized that pretty quickly. It had little to do with ideology and a lot to do with his blatant hackery.
From Calderone’s list, I think Noonan and Frum are good, but NY will never get Noonan from WSJ. Actually Frum’s performance on the Maddow show really impressed me because he was talking very specifically about getting past the pettiness and took her to task for it. That’s who Republicans should be listening to right now.
I don’t think that the Times’ management these days is nearly as ideologically tolerant or open-minded as it has been in the past. We’ll see if they go out of their way to diversify their opinion writers or if they find this an ideologically convenient place to cut a budget line. I predict the latter, especially given the intolerance that the Times’ fans have towards ANYONE who is not a doctrinaire leftist. (And Friedman gets hammered whenever he deviates from the lefty line — his treatment is a demonstration of the problem, not a refutation.)
Maybe you are right and the Times will stand up for a diverse op-ed page. We’ll see. But given the recent behavior and statements of the Times’ ownership, I am not optimistic. I think that, like MSNBC, they have made a marketing choice to throw aside any remaining pretense of neutrality and sign up for full-on ideological warfare.
Respectfully, you really need to stop reading the far left and extrapolating their opinions out to represent the broader liberal readership in this country. We’ve had debates about this before and this constant beating on the left as closed minded is not only tiring, it’s simply not accurate.
Coincidentally, out of the big international dailies (WSJ, Wash Post, Wash Times, FT) the NY Times has as balanced an editorial board as any going, and probably even moreso. How many liberal voices do you see on the other boards?
I’ll gladly stop once the “broader liberal readership” stops letting the radicals take the lead, starts criticizing them when they deserve it using consistent standards with those they use to bash the right, and stops electing political leaders that make a priority of genuflecting at Kos-fest. Honestly, I’ve looked around at all the “mainstream” liberal sites — TPM, American Street, Glenn Greenwald, FireDogLake, WhiskeyFire, Newshoggers, TalkLeft, Digby, Washington Monthly, ThinkProgress, Yglesias, etc, etc, etc. I just don’t see this tidal wave of moderate temperment you constantly claim I am ignoring. Instead, what I see is continuing deluges of BDS (even after he left office), “no enemies on the left” refusals to eve criticize Democrats for anything except for their failures in hating Republicans enough, and out-of-hand rejections of any willingness to compromise with non-leftists about anything at all. After your last set of objections to my DARING to (gasp) SAY THINGS about this issue, I when out of my way to look up the sources you referenced. I did not find moderation. I found just more hateful stereotypes and misrepresentations about conservatives, only modified in that they SOMETIMES avoided vulgarity in the process.
And I am sure I could go on your site and find some of your habits tiresome and “not accurate” as well, if I were to be so inclined. Maybe you should tend to your own garden. If you find what I write to be so tiresome, no one is forcing you to read it.
P.S. Justin, I am curious. Can you point me to some links where you have gone into the comment areas of some blogs that criticize the right wing and make complaints about their many inaccuracies, stereotypes, and misrepresentations? Or do you only take the time to complain when it is the left that comes in for what you see as unfair criticism?
Thought so.
Is that really what you got out of reading Steve Benen, Glenn Greenwald, and Josh Marshall? The others I can’t speak to since I don’t read them with any regularity, but those three I read regularly and could not disagree with you more.
I think this http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/right_needs_new_public_intellectuals/ from OTB is illustrative.
Re: the NYT and a new conservative columnist
I would be willing to bet that they are now looking for a new and hopefully much better conservative columnist to replace Kristol. Radley Balko and Michael Tomasky had some good suggestions for a replacement. I would hope that they find someone thoughtful that can effectively construct arguments for conservative positions, something seriously lacking in Kristol’s columns.
Jason,
First off, blogs do not set the tone nor determine the views of our political leaders. Otherwise Howard Dean would have been the Dem candidate for Pres. And you can talk all day about the Kos conference, but there’s this place called CPAC that has been home to screeds from the right for a much longer time.
To the point about not commenting, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t read either far right or far left blogs with any regularity. However, you say you visited some sites I referenced (I’m assuming in that previous post by Michael about conservatives being naturally more gracious, which I would appreciate a link to) and you found them full of hateful stereotypes? Well, you’re grouping one of the blogs I read together with many I don’t. I read Wash Monthly on a daily basis out of those and that’s it. TPM I used to read for election coverage, but I don’t read the main site anymore. Greenwald I’ve never read with any type of frequency. Still, if you found Wash Monthly to be way out of bounds, well, ya got me. I don’t think it is, and I think you’ll see that most bloggers don’t think it is either. That doesn’t make us right, it just makes your opinion in the minority.
Still, you’re obviously bothered by my comment enough to make some broad assumptions about me (“Thought so”? Really?). Well, as mentioned, I don’t comment on left-wing blogs. In fact, the only blog I comment on is my own, and even then I have trouble doing it because I have a full time job and there are only so many hours in the day. But I do what I can, when I can. In fact, that I took the time to come over here and engage in debate with you is a rare thing. Too bad it’s needlessly devolved.
Still, I’ll reiterate that I take issue with the supposition that the NY Times is in the pocket of Daily Kos and the left wing blogosphere. I think that’s easily proven false because I can answer the title of your post “Can The New York Times Tolerate A Conservative?” with “Tolerate? How about elevate? They currently are and they always have.”
One last thing, since you assume to know so much about my commenting habits, I’m sure you saw this today:
http://donklephant.com/2009/01/23/84-approval-for-infrastructure-spending/comment-page-1/#comment-435640
I do this with both sides. And I delete many more comments that go out of bounds than I actually comment on. That’s all I have time for.
Take it easy.