Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Liberal Support of Free Speech: William Kristol and the New York Times

Dana has a nice post on the liberal hysteria on display over the New York Times' hiring of Bill Kristol as a columnist.


Liberals seem to come unglued any time a prominent news organization hires a token conservative to write opinion pieces sporadically. In this case, Kristol's column will appear once a week. So, currently, the NYT has:

Maureen Dowd--not a conservative

Thomas Friedman--definitely not a conservative

Frank Rich--definitely not a conservative

David Brooks--the liberal idea of conservatism

Bob Herbert--definitely, definitely not a conservative.

Roger Cohen--a man best described as "continental" in that he doesn't seem to particularly like American foreign policy but can't come up with anything better, so, he snipes about it.

Gail Collins--definitely not a conservative

Nicholas D. Kristof--not a conservative

William Safire--a libertarian who doesn't mind bashing conservatives when it suits him.

And now they've added Kristol, arguably the most conservative writer there. And, with the exception of Frank Rich, all the other columnists write twice weekly. In other words, the moonbats are upset that one conservative voice is heard weekly. In the immortal words of Echidne:
What's worse, this wingnut favoritism means that readers get many more conservative takes on every topic than they get liberal ones (all the major "liberal" newspapers are full of Republican writers and of course all the major conservative newspapers are chock full of them).

I'm not sure which liberal newspapers are "full of Republican writers." Certainly no newspaper I've ever read regularly. But the mask slips when liberals complain about conservative writers getting space in the supposedly elite New York Times: what they are truly afraid of (and they are afraid, yes, very afraid) is that reading conservative views will actually cause people to agree with those views. I guess if your ideology is bankrupt, you really can't afford for people to read anything other than your own propaganda.