Neocons Down,
But Not Out
Looks like I spoke too soon: in Friday’s column: I wrote that Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer are being dropped by Time magazine, because Americans are "done with pundits like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer who were dead wrong about the war, and whom they regard as discredited and no longer worth listening to." Well, not the people who inhabit the editorial offices of the New York Times, where Kristol has just been taken on as a columnist, giving the neocons two podiums (including the one occupied by David Brooks) from which to issue their war cries and smear their opponents as anti-American reprobates.
I think, however, that this reinforces my thesis in that piece by illustrating the growing gap between popular and elite political culture, with anti-neocon sentiment typical of the former and total accommodation the rule for the latter. The liberal New York Times only recognizes one variety of "conservative," and that is the warmonger, pro-Big Government sort.
javier
December 28th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
If there are no comments maybe it’s because nobody cares what The New York Times does. I don’t read newspapers anymore.
peace
December 28th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Sorry you were wrong, Justin.
Daniel Maxwell
December 28th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Re: #1
Good point javier. I wouldnt bite Justin for posting about it, but your point is very true. In a few years, I predict many papers are going to start going under. Who has the time to read a paper these days? Not as many people these days. Technology will be the newspaper’s undertaker.
wadosy
December 28th, 2007 at 11:21 pm
whack-a-mole
Oebe NL
December 29th, 2007 at 2:28 am
Then who knows, maybe the rigidly empiricist Virginia Heffernan still has a good chance to make employee of the month in January.
G.Kurtz
December 29th, 2007 at 4:27 am
The msm are so full of themselves they haven’t noticed how little they matter anymore. Network news, newspapers and cable will all disappear. The only trustworthy news is on the internet. I read the posts on youtube and sense a whole lot of anger toward the msm. About the only thing the Times is good for is wiping my dogs butt after … well you get my point.
John Lowell
December 29th, 2007 at 5:42 am
The New York Times’ naming of Kristol as a columnist simply serves to denegrate the perception that the system against which the American people are arrayed is something genuinely bi-partite. What could be more clear with this development than that the regime has two heads.
Pernicious Pavlovian
December 29th, 2007 at 6:51 am
Headline from tomorrow’s New York Times, ‘Let Them Eat Cake’!
Kirk Hayes
December 29th, 2007 at 6:56 am
Let them go where they will. Anyone who believes the MSM and anyone associated with it deserves to be lead over a cliff into the abyss.
lester1/2jr
December 29th, 2007 at 7:58 am
that’s just bizarre.
salem s
December 29th, 2007 at 10:02 am
The New york Times,and for that matter all the MSM,is the Pravda of our times,but worse.
Kari Konkola
December 29th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Do you recall what happened to The New Republic? They were intensely pro-war, and in a few years they lost about half of their subscribers and had to be taken over. To my knowledge, there has never been such a collapse in the MSM before. This suggests the division is not only elite vs. the general population. Part of the elite itself is against the war-mongering neocon line. The neocons, however, seem to have a strong hold of the Main Stream Media, and that obviously includes the New York Times.
Joe O.
December 29th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I can not believe that anyone really pays much attention to the New York Times anymore. Its a paper that has become more like a supermarket tabloid than an actual news source. After all, this is the same paper that had people like Jason Blair and Judith Miller as prominent journalists. Now, they are adding another liar, Bill Kristol to their roster.
richard
December 29th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
I thought antiwar.com was the MSM these days?
Carol Watson
December 29th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Think of the convenience, though. If we can herd all these neocons over to the New York Times, it will be so much easier to completely ignore them.
Rowan Berkeley
December 29th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
I don’t think it is beyond the bounds of possibility that some of the more agile erstwhile neocons will suddenly stop being pseudo-rightists and become pseudo-leftists.
G5
December 29th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Even online dinosaur media will die as it’s too easy to check their lies with a few clicks.
Jack
December 30th, 2007 at 8:00 am
F the New York Times!! It’s nothing but a mouthpiece for the New World Order. F the Elite!!!!!!!!!
Hal
December 30th, 2007 at 11:17 am
As a New York institution the Times has to cater to Zionist-warmongers and Neocons. Hence it is perfectly logical for it to hire a model of a Zionist/warmonger/Neocon. After all it was the NYT that gave Judith what-was-her-name? a bully pulpit from which to spew warmongering propaganda. Only when things went so badly awry was she sacked. If I recall correctly, the NYT also swallowed all the Bush propaganda leading up to the war.
Mark Williams
December 31st, 2007 at 3:50 pm
The Zionists who run the NYT are panicking. The threats to the Israel lobby are being met with intensified efforts to saturate us with neocon propaganda.
Bill K.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:36 pm
It does not appear that talent in writing is necessary and that anybody with an agenda can write for the NYT. Why don’t they hire me? I can keep the Editorials coming daily!
Mark Williams
January 1st, 2008 at 9:05 am
It’s a little more complicated than that. The NYT played a double game in the run-up to the Iraq war. They opposed it on their editorial page, but in the “news” pages they put Judith Miller’s (and Michael Gordon’s) pro-war WMD propaganda on the front page above the fold.
But now that Americans are becoming more widely skeptical of the Israel lobby and its agenda, the Times has decided to give more opinion space to the warmongers — perhaps to help “centrist” neoliberal warmongers like Tom Friedman appear more reasonable?