Billy Kristol: Asshole

William Kristol’s appointment as a weekly columnist for the New York Times was announced at year’s end and precipitated public excoriation—in blogs, mainly, and in complaints to media writers—from those who saw it as a neo-con assault on the integrity of the New York Times’ op-ed page, the supreme court of opinion in the United States. A less vociferous private view was that getting Kristol was like, say, the Yankees hiring a player from a second-tier club who was an MVP a decade ago, a tired choice.

I was literally half a world away in China at the time and my first thought was substantially different. Kristol is a full-time employee of Rupert Murdoch. He edits the Weekly Standard on which Murdoch has spent and lost millions of dollars. He is also a regular contributor to Fox News. So it is fair to say that he must be a valued member of the Murdoch team, who still finds time to dash off (more on the dashing off part below) for well-paid freelance gigs like the regular column he had in Time magazine in 2007. So, the New York Times recruited a prime Murdoch property at exactly the moment Murdoch had taken over the Wall Street Journal with its own stable of conservative columnists and said he was taking on the New York Times in an aggressive contest for influence.

If this paradox did not cross the minds of the New York Times’ management or Murdoch’s News Corporation, they would all be clueless—which they are not. This was, I’m betting, a transaction that has a subtext that is at least as much about business, one outfit luring another’s asset, as it is about political journalism.

Was Kristol worth the fracas? I am not a reader of the Weekly Standard (except when flying the Shuttle to Washington where it was and perhaps still is, given away). So I pulled a stack of Kristol’s signed editorials from the Weekly Standard and his Time columns. Setting aside his point of view, with which I mostly disagree, what struck me most about them is that they read, without exception, like they were written in a hurry, by a person whose fluency cannot conceal what is superficial judgment and reporting. Kristol had nothing to add in perspective or voice to a great many other conservatives that any casual consumer of the category will find in print, online, and on the air. After considering the Kristol question, the New York Times’ own arbiter, Clark Hoyt, concluded that taking him on was a mistake (New York Times “Week in Review,” January 13). Still, he wondered whether the degree and scale of denunciation—hundreds of fulminating e-mails against; one in favor—was disproportionate to the error.

For at least a generation now, New York Times columnists—including William Safire who came from Richard Nixon’s White House—have been known for their distinctive styles. Many of the best of them—Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, Frank Rich, and earlier, the much-missed Russell Baker and Anthony Lewis—were completely home-grown. They became columnists because of their superb reporting for the New York Times that they then combined with a persona that makes or made them consistently interesting to read.

David Brooks, like Safire, came to the New York Times as a conservative writer. But Brooks is a real pundit who breaks ground with his insights that significantly shape the news and social change in ways readers didn’t already know when they picked up the newspaper. I enjoy reading his columns, which are largely free of the cant and demonizing peculiar to so many right-wing oracles. That is what is confounding about the anointment of Kristol to the New York Times pantheon: he gets away with being what seems to be cursory on every subject in the limited spectrum about which he writes. The opening sentence of his inaugural column on January 7 was this: “Manchester, N.H.—Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.”

In the genre of political opining, that would be hard to top for facile, dreary, and as it turned out, wrong. His column this week was equally thin. Let’s assume that Kristol could do better, but he is just too busy editing a weekly magazine and appearing on television. Columns should reflect hard work in writing and reporting, or at least enough of a perfervid approach to the world to make reading them a pleasure or a poke. A regular piece in the New York Times is not something you can dash-off on the way to a television studio, where more often than not, you will say exactly the same thing. I think Kristol is a lost opportunity not because of what he says, but of the lazy way he says it.

In any case, now that Kristol works for the New York Times as well as the company owned by its avowed fierce competitor, his supervisors at both places should demand that he prove he’s up to his many, many jobs.

Link.