Posted on 01/05/2008 5:54:41 PM PST by pa_dweller
Although we have been very critical of the New York Times over its journalistic and business failings, there have been interesting signs of change there lately. The paper announced that Bill Kristol will write one column per week on its op-ed page. And yesterday there was a sensible op-ed by William Dalrymple on the decidedly mixed legacy of Benazir Bhutto.
It is hard to know if there is a move back toward the center-left for the paper, but if there is one, it might well be in recognition of the looming crisis the paper faces as Rupert Murdoch begins fashioning the Wall Street Journal into a general interest daily capable of drawing more readers and advertisers away from the Times' national edition.
American Thinker will soon be publishing a major article by Ed Lasky on the Times-Journal strategic face-off, which promises to [be] a major event in media history.
But in the meantime, having cultivated a left wing readership, the Times is finding resistance in its efforts to move in from the left margin of politics. Jane Smiley, novelist and occasional writer for the Times, pens a bitter farewell to the paper. It seems that William Kristol is just too much for her to tolerate. This is a full-blown case of BDS rage, and it isn't very pretty:
If you think that the Iraq War is a crime, as I do, it is bad enough that he was one of the primary cheerleaders for it, even after every single one of the reasons that the Cheney/Bush/right wing gave for the attack was exposed. But he is worse than that. Until the NIE report, he was actively advocating bombing Iran, preferably with nuclear weapons, even though the civilians in Iran who would be bombed have nothing at all to do with whatever the Iranian government is doing, or as it turns out, not doing to develop nuclear weapons. In Iraq alone, Kristol has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands. He is unrepentant and eager for more. [....]Why would the Times hire such a person? Stockholm Syndrome? Some kind if inside-the-beltway joke? An attempt to lure that bloc of American newspaper readers who listen to Rush Limbaugh? Earth to Times! Maybe they can't read!
There's nothing quite like reasoned debate, is there?
Hat tips: Richard Baehr, Herb Meyer
It’s too late for the Times to regain readership and like you I’m more worried about tampering with the WSJ.
Adding one column per week from Kristol and a single article from Dalrymple constitutes a move to the center? Only for the NYT I suppose. I think they would rather go down with their sinking liberal ship than give Conservatives a fair shake.
While they are not forthrightly conservative on those issues, they are not liberal on them. For example, they are liberal on immigration. You don't see that staunch support of leftist positions on any other themes. They host columns written by people not on the staff that are socially conservative, moreso than social liberals.
So overall, I put the WSJ Editorial Page as strongly Economic and Defense conservative, and Socially slightly conservative.
Same with me. Don’t know why.
Bill Kristol...yeah, Mister Excitement.
Most tech folk I know can barely stand to live in the real world. Why care about what they think of newspaper?
Interestingly, if you use two words from the title, “NYT faces”, you find it...
I will support the NYT’s with money taken....... from my cold dead hands.
I fear you may be correct.
I thought I'd seen this somewhere. At the bottom of the search screen is this:
Limitations: Only article titles can be searched and words with three or fewer letters are not searched at all.
Thanks, I hadn’t noticed that before. Now I know!
Thanks. I read her [I can't find a proper pejorative to put here] article. Although it's gussied up with fancy words and such and she sounds real smart and all, I completely checked out at :
Here is how ignorance works: First, they put the fear of God into you—if you don't believe in the literal word of the Bible, you will burn in hell. Of course, the literal word of the Bible is tremendously contradictory, and so you must abdicate all critical thinking, and accept a simple but logical system of belief that is dangerous to question.
How can the Bible be simultaneously contradictory and logical?
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