A Note On NY Times Edit Page Editor Andy Rosenthal's Claim That Bill Kristol's Critics Are "Intolerant"
January 3, 2008 -- 10:58 AM EST // //
Via Romenesko, I urge you to read Charles Kaiser's dissection in Radar magazine of the Times's decision to hire Bill Kristol.
As many of you know already, the Kristol hiring was greeted by an explosion of criticism in the liberal blogosphere and elsewhere, prompting Times edit page editor Andy Rosenthal to describe Kristol in startlingly positive terms and to label critics of the deal "intolerant." Needless to say, this pissed people off even more. Kaiser adds some key context:
What makes this all the more mysterious—and depressing—is the fact that Rosenthal continues to produce one of the most intelligent and fiercely antiwar editorial pages in America.This is really critical to understanding why the Kristol hiring is such a friggin' disaster and why people are so riled up by it. As I've noted here before, the Times edit page doesn't get the credit it deserves for being a key voice of sanity at crucial moments when much of the liberal opinion-making establishment has collectively lost its mind. The Times editorialized against the war right on the eve of invasion, was an early critic of Bush and has taken a sledgehammer to the current Dem Congressional leadership's craven capitulations to Bush and the GOP.
Now, on to Rosenthal and his claim that Kristol's critics are "intolerant."
One of the key premises of the liberal blogospheric critique of establishment political journalism, as I understand it, is that there's such a thing as legitimate media criticism -- that getting the big news orgs to do better journalism and to upgrade the quality of our discourse will ultimately better serve progressive ends. Many journalists and pundits have of course falsely dismissed such criticism as mere partisan gaming of the refs -- as an effort to bully the big news orgs into pumping out lefty propaganda. The refusal of many media figures to acknowledge the real aims of the liberal media critique is a key point of tension between the traditional media and the lib bloggers and other critics.
The hiring of Kristol and Rosenthal's prickish dismissal of criticism for it dumped gas on that fire, exacerbating that tension in a big way, which explains why folks were so ticked off about it. Few media figures have done more to pollute and debase our discourse than Kristol has, and if there were ever a legit topic for criticism, this indefensible granting of a prized journalistic platform to Kristol is it. That someone who presides over arguably one of the most progressive institutional voices in the land would describe Kristol's journalism positively and dismiss criticism of the deal in somnolent David Broder-esque terms reminds us yet again just how hidebound, clueless, and even prone to intellectual corruption some attitudes remain, even among our liberal journalistic elites.
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