This week there's been lots of outrage in the liberal blogosphere, and on the letters page, about the Times's decision to hire William Kristol as an Op Ed columnist.
Who is William Kristol? The son of Irving Kristol, one of the godfathers of the modern neoconservative movement. Chief of staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle. Founder of the Weekly Standard, an influential conservative publication. Fierce critic of the New York Times. And fierce defender of the virtue of the Iraq war.
If you present me with 100 issues, I'll disagree with Kristol on 99 of them (at least). That doesn't mean I won't read his weekly column, or that he should be denied the right to have it. The left's hand-wringing about this is both unnecessary and unbecoming. What's so hard about defeating Kristol in the realm of ideas? What's so attractive about denying him a column?
I'm looking forward to being enraged every Monday morning by whatever Kristol says--it will get my juices flowing, and prompt me to think more carefully about why I believe what I do. Sounds good to me.
Hi Marcus,
I think Kristol is a fine hire for the Times. It adds a prominent establishment conservative voice to the Op-Ed page that has been absent since William Safire devoted himself exclusively to language. Kristol had an interesting and prescient take on the 2004 Presidential election, when he said, on CNN, that political climates move in cycles and everyone gets a turn. I do think it's reasonable to say that, as a macro-level concern, newspapers in general should start moving past the idea that there is a strict political line running left to right, and every citizen occupies one fixed point on that line. The hiring of Kristol is problematic to the extent that it reinforces this perspective on American politics. Hopefully, larger forces reshaping party politics in America will continue to move toward unity rather than division, but that's probably wishful thinking. The NYTimes should return to viewing itself, rightly, as the paper of national record, rather than some Fox-News-prescribed tool of the left that needs to pay lip service to the right by hiring the Bill Kristols of the world. In the meantime, I look forward to reading what the guy has to say. He's certainly earned a column at whichever newspaper would have him.
Posted by: Wevbo | January 05, 2008 at 06:35 PM
Great points John. I wasn't thinking about Kristol's hiring as an example of the left/right commentary status quo at the Times, but that's exactly what it is.
My chagrin, as ever, is directed at supposed "liberals" who only want to make room for the people who already agree with them.
Posted by: Marcus | January 05, 2008 at 09:42 PM