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Bill Kristol Having A Ball
Fooling The N.Y. Times
of TheColumnists.com
I bow to no person
in my admiration for The New York Times. But like the
rest of us it is far from perfect-as these two instances of journalistic
boobery attest:
Dec. 29 marks the one-year anniversary of the New York Times’
gaffe of hiring Bill Kristol to write a weekly column. It would
be as good a time as any for The Times to admit its mistake
and dump Kristol.
Kristol is an embarrassment on many levels. He has often been wrong, he uses the column to advance his own reactionary, war-mongering agenda and he is journalistically sloppy. All that could be the prerogative of a columnist, however wrong he may be. But where Kristol goes over the line that The Times should have drawn is that he is an active agent promulgating the interests of the Republican party.
An Oct. 27 article in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer pinned down Kristol’s inside role in pushing Sarah Palin for Vice President on the Republican ticket. It should have been enough right there for The Times to have seen it was being duped by El Wrongo.
In the summer of 2007 The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch, of which Kristol is the editor (he did not relinquish the post upon gaining The Times gig) hosted a luxury cruise to Alaska. Kristol was one of three Standard editors on the trip and on June 18 he met Governor Palin at a lunch she gave at the executive mansion.
The leader of a Republican woman’s organization, Paulette Simpson, said the three Standard people “were very enamored of her.” The New Yorker piece said, “The most ardent promoter…was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska political circles. According to Simpson, Republican Senator Ted Stevens told her that ‘Kristol was really pushing Palin’ in Washington before McCain picked her.”
The New Yorker piece continued, “Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before John McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on Fox News Sunday that McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket. He described her as ‘fantastic.’ ”
On a subsequent Fox News program Kristol again pushed Palin. He said he had met her only once, but “I was awfully impressed…It would be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor….McCain ought to go for it.”
And on another Fox appearance on July 18, The New Yorker piece says, Kristol referred to Palin as “my heartthrob.” He declared, “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.” He later told The New Yorker he had ratcheted back his campaign a little, and though he continued to tout her, he wrote a Times column promoting Senator Joe Liberman, the man whose pro-Israel stances most match Kristol’s.
The Times was being used by Kristol not so much in the interests of truth but as an insider in the Republican party. The man’s career reeks with dishonesty. In 2005 Kristol praised George W. Bush’s second inaugural address without disclosing his role as a consultant to the writing of the speech.
The Times had an early taste of Kristol’s journalistic integrity when he relied on a questionable right-wing source without checking to write that Barack Obama was in attendance at a controversial sermon given by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright July 22, 2007 at his church in Chicago. It turned out that Obama was not at the sermon, was not even in Chicago on that date. Kristol penned a mealy-mouthed apology.
Kristol was wrong on insisting Saddam Hussein
had weapons of mass destruction, wrong on declaring that a war
in Iraq “could have terrifically good
effects throughout the Middle East’, wrong on maintaining
the war could cost $100 billion to $200 billion when the cost
has come to half-a-trillion dollars.”
Kristol was entitled to all these opinions, but why The Times hired him off those past performances is a stain that will remain. The anniversary this month of that hiring will be an apt time to unload the gent.
* * *
That brings us to The Times’ woeful coverage of the
first appearance of the three auto chiefs before a Congressional
hearing on Nov. 19. This was the occasion when the heads of General
Motors, Ford and Chrysler became the laughing stock of the nation
by flying in private jets in their bid to beg for money from
Congress.
Can you believe that The Times story had nothing about their private jets buffoonery? The story by David Herszenhorn and Bill Vlasic ran for 28 paragraphs in the business section, but nary a word about the private jets.
They managed to write this story without quoting the comments of Rep. Gary Ackerman of New York. He said, “There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington D.C. and people coming off them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their business. It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo.”
The private jets story was broken by ABC television; it was all over cable television and the internet, and was wonderful comic fodder for TV, newspaper cartoons and columnists.
It was a few days before mention of the private jets made The Times. In time it even made the lead of a Times pro football story by Karen Crouse. She wrote about the inept Detroit Lions Thanksgiving Day performance, “In a city that is home to auto executives who traveled in private jets to Washington to plead poverty, the Lions still provide the biggest laughs…”
By Dec. 3, when the auto guys were scheduled
for another appearance in Washington, the lead story by John
Schwartz in the Times business section read:
“As the fate of the United States auto industry hangs
in the balance, a profound question has taken center stage: what
about the planes? The chief executives …are hoping to avoid
another drubbing like the one they received during a Congressional
hearing on Nov. 19 for having flown on their private jets to
Washington to plead for a bailout.”
They drove to Washington in hybrid cars.
In this case it was “All the News That’s Fit to Print-Eventually.”
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo of Bill Kristol is courtesy of The Evening Standard. This column first posted Dec. 8, 2008.
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