Well, it’s official: The New York Times, having replaced William Safire with John Tierney, now has two dedicated “conservative seats” on its op-ed page. Meanwhile, as I wrote a month ago, the Wall Street Journal, having lost its sole token sorta-liberal, has…not replaced him at all.
The Times constantly takes brickbats from the right for its supposed liberal bias, but it’s clearly trying to find room on its opinion pages for a variety of perspectives. Meanwhile, the Journal, whose editorial pages list far further to the right than the Times’ lean leftward, doesn’t seem to think it need bother expose its readers to those who disagree with it.
These papers pretty much represent the U.S.’s two most important national dailies. When I beef about the Journal, I sometimes get e-mail from people I know (or don’t know) who work there, protesting that I shouldn’t hold the editorial pages’ neanderthal bias against the rest of the paper. And it’s true: I love the Journal’s feature writing, and a lot of its news coverage is fair and reasonably non-ideological. I would say exactly the same thing about the Times’ news pages.
Yet on the opinion/editorial side, the distinction couldn’t be more vivid, and it needs to be said, over and over again: One paper has a hubbub of different points of view, the other has a starkly uniform party line that is significantly off to the margins of the American mainstream.
That difference hasn’t seemed to filter very far into the blogosphere’s media-criticism memepool. Anti-Times noise is endemic here, whereas the Journal doesn’t seem to warrant more than an occasional snipe. Maybe that’s a sign of the Journal’s subscription-only self-marginalization; but Dow Jones has actually placed most Journal opinion-writing on the free Opinionjournal.com site, so I don’t think that’s it.
Rather, this is one more data point in the right’s campaign against the Times and other media institutions that it sees as impediments on the path to total reality control. The scorched-earth ground rules parallel the CNN/Fox argument. Conservatives jealously defend their right to own their own partisan media outlets, while loudly complaining that anyone still foolish enough to struggle for balance is hopelessly biased to the left.
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