We're kicking off our annual list with the
best paper in the country -- which could do a lot better than these two
By Alex Pareene
This
year, my annual list of the worst of political media highlights not
just individuals, but the institutions that enable those individuals.
The 2012 Hack List will be counting down the 10 media outlets that are
hurting America over the next two days — stay tuned! (Previous Hack List
entries here, here and here.)
The
New York Times is America’s Last Newspaper, and because of that it is
the recipient of a lot of grief that it doesn’t always entirely deserve.
Conservatives think it’s the Daily Worker. Liberals blame it for Iraq
and Bush’s second term. Young people refuse to pay to read it.
The
truth is, it is a good newspaper. It has great reporting that it spends
a bunch of money on. It has a crossword puzzle. It has David Carr.
But
the Times has a columnist problem. The problem is that “New York Times
columnist” is one of the very few legitimately powerful positions in the
field of “writing down your thoughts on politics,” in terms of audience
and influence, and for years now the Times has decided that Maureen
Dowd calling every female politician in the nation a bitch is a good use
of that platform. Obviously not all their columnists are huge problems.
Paul Krugman is right about everything, Gail Collins is hilarious and
Charles Blow’s election columns were impressively, 100 percent
bullshit-free.
But the rest of their stable, ugh. Do Bill Keller
and
Frank Bruni really need to grace us with their opinions each week? Ross
Douthat is essentially a parody of the sort of conservative Times
readers would find palatable, now that David Brooks is a sad shell of
his former self, listlessly summarizing random bits of social science
and pretending the Republican Party is secretly moderate and reasonable.
But
two men, in their own ways, sum up the real problem with the Times: how
it shapes the opinions and biases of the sort of fantastically wealthy
liberal-leaning elites who legitimately do have a great deal of power,
in this country and abroad. And no columnists are as essential for the
Aspen Ideas Festival class as Thomas Friedman and Nick Kristof.
Thomas Friedman
Thomas
Friedman is a national embarrassment. We all are well aware of that by
now, right? Everyone knows Thomas Friedman is a fraud and a simpleton,
whose job is to sell comforting platitudes to rapacious plutocrats and
those who aspire to be rapacious plutocrats.
But this was a particularly bad year for Tom. You should seriously
reread his column on Americans Elect.
It’s amazing. “What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did
to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to
pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that
has dominated American political life — remove the barriers to real
competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in.” And that’s
why we now have president-elect Huntsman.
In November,
he proposed nominating Secretary of Education Arne Duncan for secretary of state.
Why? Because technocrat Davos types love education reform (and they
think teachers’ unions are the moral equivalent of Hamas). These two
paragraphs perfectly encapsulate the empty, buzzword-heavy, repetitive
non-style that makes Friedman so beloved by barely literate MBAs or
whoever it is who’s buying his books by the truckload:
There
is a deeper point here: The biggest issue in the world today is growth,
and, in this information age, improving educational outcomes for more
young people is now the most important lever for increasing economic
growth and narrowing income inequality. In other words, education is now
the key to sustainable power. To have a secretary of state who is one
of the world’s leading authorities on education, well, everyone would
want to talk to him. For instance, it would be very helpful to have a
secretary of state who can start a negotiating session with Hamas
leaders (if we ever talk with them) by asking: “Do you know how far
behind your kids are?” That might actually work better than: “Why don’t
you recognize Israel?”
“The biggest issue in the world today is
growth, and the world is divided into two groups — those who get it and
those who don’t,” said Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University
foreign policy expert. “If you’re dealing with the Middle East, it might
actually be helpful to have someone who can tell some of the parties
why they are going in the wrong direction and how their problems are not
what they think they are, nor are their solutions.”
Yes,
Friedman used the exact same vague generalization to start two
consecutive paragraphs. And yes the second paragraph’s quote is
obviously the source for everything Friedman wrote in the first
paragraph, making the first paragraph unnecessary. And yes, Friedman
thinks that would be a constructive thing to ask Hamas. “Have you
considered instituting a strict standardized testing regimen in
Gaza????”
Then Friedman
said
Michael Bloomberg should be president because Friedman saw a broken
escalator in Washington and had poor cellphone service on a train. And he said that “the lesson of Iraq” — meaning the war he relentlessly pushed for — was that
every country should be occupied by the United States until they turn into Switzerland, like Iraq did.
Nick Kristof
Friedman
is certainly the worst actual human being employed by the New York
Times. But his vileness often lets his colleagues off the hook. Like
Nicholas Kristof, crusading opinion columnist hero. While Thomas
Friedman travels the globe attending conferences and making obscene
amounts of money speaking to billionaires for an hour, Nick Kristof
travels the globe rescuing sex workers by getting them arrested and then
attempting to find them jobs in sweatshops to produce our cheap clothing.
Oh, he also makes a lot of money talking to people, though his
$25,000-$50,000 speaking fee is a bit less than ol’ Tom Friedman’s. (The
Times only allows its staff members to accept fees from educational and
nonprofit groups, and requires staffers earning more than $5,000 in a
year to submit a detailed accounting of their appearances. Both of these
rules were almost universally ignored until
Friedman got everyone in trouble in 2009 by accepting $75,000 to speak to a California government agency.)
Kristof’s
self-aggrandizing heroism is what’s made him a journalism superstar,
and largely immune to the sort of bitching that his opinion page
colleagues receive, because he is Out There Doing Stuff instead of
opining from behind a desk. But while he is indeed Out There, his years
of Raising Awareness have, as far as I can tell, largely succeeded in
making a bunch of rich old Times readers Aware of Nick Kristof.
His
writing always features morally unambiguous black-and-white heroes and
villains. The heroes are frequently rescuing helpless maidens. Kristof
declines to see complexity in every great crisis he tackles, and largely
refuses to acknowledge that money and American “intervention” are
frequently as much the cause of so many of his Causes as the potential
solution. As Teju Cole put it:
His good heart does not
always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the
dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.” All
he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism
way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is
need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.
He
is also the Times Africa “expert” who rarely demonstrates any special
knowledge of the history, culture or society of any of the African
nations he parachutes into to save innocents.
Just the headlines
and teasers of some of his columns from this summer show how quickly
this style of do-gooder rich liberalism lapses into self-parody:
Big Chem, Big Harm?
Chemicals in everything from canned food to A.T.M. receipts could affect you, your children and your children’s children.
August 26, 2012, Sunday
War Wounds
This veteran wishes he had lost a limb. Instead, he has to watch himself lose his mind.
August 12, 2012, Sunday
Obama AWOL in Syria
Why is Obama passive as thousands of Syrians are dying? Top strategists want him to act now.
August 08, 2012, Wednesday
Blissfully Lost in the Woods
Here’s a little advice for the overburdened and overconnected: take a hike.
July 29, 2012, Sunday
The dateline on that last one: “ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL, Ore.” Obama should
do something about Syria and also oh isn’t backpacking through Oregon delightful,
everyone should do it.
Kristof’s
reliance on anecdote and personal narratives above all else
occasionally lead him to deeply stupid conclusions, like his
column this December arguing that we should cut a meager poverty program designed for low-income children with disabilities because
he heard secondhand that some people weren’t teaching their kids to read in order to qualify for it.
Illiteracy isn’t actually what qualifies kids for SSI — actual doctors
must submit proof of physical or mental disability in order for the
children to qualify for the $600 that is making them so “dependent” —
but even if you accept the truth of Kristof’s anecdote, his conclusion
barely makes sense. Why would cutting SSI and using that money to pay for early childhood education make more sense than just paying for
both and making sure some random parents in Kentucky aren’t committing fraud? (Kristof’s also
a school reformer, natch.)
Thomas Friedman, Nicholas Kristoff (Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson/AP/Andy Kropa/Salon)
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