Dowd and Kristol - the opinion face of the NY Tmies

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters dissects the recent hiring of Bill Kristol as a political opinion writer by the New York Times, and compares his work to the founts of nasty fiction produced by Maureen Dowd.

Bill Kristol and Maureen Dowd deserve each other; they belong on the same team. As media critic Dan Kennedy noted last week, "Kristol has never shown much, if any, regard for the ethical conventions of journalism." And Joan Walsh at Salon added, "Kristol is anti-truth." One could say the same about Dowd.

The Times leadership has convinced itself that the duo will anchor some sort of opinion all-star squad, but I think more and more loyal readers and independent observers will come to the opposite conclusion: that Kristol and Dowd represent the troubling demise of the paper's commitment to serious, and entertaining, opinion journalism.

That the Times wants to view the crucial 2008 presidential campaign through the prism of Kristol and Dowd tells you all you need to know about the paper's priorities.[Snip]

There's simply no way that New York Times editors read Kristol's phoned-in agitprop in Time last year and turned to each other, and to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who OKs hirings on the opinion pages, and said, "We've got to get this guy!" And that's why the newspaper's decision to hire Kristol feels much more like a political appointment than it does a journalistic hire. Nobody has ever argued that the Times operates as a pure meritocracy, but elevating Kristol to the most prestigious perch in punditry and then pretending he earned the spot on the strength of his clips is, of course, preposterous.

And indeed, even more befuddling than tapping Kristol was the sad spectacle of Times leaders staging an embarrassing kabuki dance where they insisted they hired Kristol because he's a "serious, respected conservative intellectual," as editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal told Politico. [Snip]

how badly did Times big-wigs want to hire neo-con strategist Kristol? So badly they threw out their employee handbook in order to extend a sweetheart deal to Kristol.

Not only does the high-profile hiring of Kristol flout a recently announced hiring freeze inside the New York Times newsroom, but a Times spokeswoman confirmed to me that Kristol will become the first political columnist hired by the newspaper in the modern era who will be allowed to keep a full-time publishing job outside the Times. And in this case, as editor of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, Kristol will continue to draw a paycheck from a direct Times competitor, since Murdoch, as the new owner of the Wall Street Journal, has made it quite plain that he plans on using the business daily to directly compete against The New York Times, which Murdoch claims is elitist and liberal.

Oh yeah, Kristol will be given further exemption from the Times' employee guidelines and allowed to remain on the board of policy think tanks. Could the Times have found a more tangled set of conflicts if they tried?

So it's clear that the New York Times wants Bill Kristol badly. Why?

It's not his writing, which is klunky, boring, filled with factual errors and not even really good as right-wing propaganda. When Time magazine hired him early in 2007 as a 'star' opinion writer, they wound up only publishing four article that he wrote in the second half of the year.

It's time to plan the funeral for the New York Times. Their management has gone brain-dead, and the paper can't be far behind.