Fantasy New York Times Columnist Page

As I mentioned yesterday in comments, I’ve been thinking about the pathetic state of the New York Times columnist section lately. The Washington Post op-ed page is also terrible, but it’s terrible in the way that it should be terrible–a bunch of right-wing nuts, but they are influential (more or less) right-wing nuts, representing actual consistencies in the Beltway. The Times page is just bad. We’ve all known this for years, but I was really agitated by Kristof’s idiotic column about academics not writing for the public and there are so many bad or meh columnists on the page. I think Maureen Dowd’s column about Francois Hollande not cheating on his partner in the right way had to be an all-time low point for her, although the competition is stiff. Then there’s Tom Friedman writing columns that are nothing more than job advertisements for Google. Meanwhile, Kristof is flying first class around the world saving people while consistently refusing to support people trying to improve their own lives.

So what if we could fire everyone at the Times and start over? Let’s play that game. What would it look like? Who would you keep? I want to establish a vague metric, Value over Replacement Columnist. I’m assuming what one wants in a Times columnist is an original thinker with consistently interesting things to say who also works hard at their job. You want someone people are going to talk about, brands that are interesting and provide added value to the paper. You want high VORC from your columnists. Unfortunately, there’s only one person at the times who actually works hard, has interesting things to say, and grabs your attention. Krugman of course.

Unfortunately, everyone else falls into 1 of 2 categories. Either people talk about them all the time despite or usually because they are so bad (Brooks, Friedman, Kristof, Dowd, Douthat) or they are just not very good at their jobs, writing OK columns I guess but that nobody ever or rarely talks about (Collins, Blow, Nocera, Cohen, Bruni). The former have strikingly negative VORC, the latter replacement-level VORC. Blow is a nice liberal, but there are dozens of people (if not hundreds) who could do this as well as he. And if Blow did disappear, how long would it be before anyone noticed?

I’m also setting two vague groundrules that you can accept or not at your pleasure. First, the columnist page should look more or less like it already looks. Which means you have to have conservatives. The Times has 2, so let’s keep it at that. And the page can’t be a bunch of flaming left-wingers either. Liberals of various stripes, yes. But the game isn’t about finding the people who are all ideological the same as you. Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky are not realistic options. The choices also have to provide diversity of topic. If you are keeping Krugman, you can’t have a bunch of other liberal economist types. Second, I’m going to assume the Times management isn’t going to take a lot of risks. They aren’t picking an LGM writer. Too unknown. So who already has a platform large enough to come to the Times attention?

Finally, I respect DJW’s idea that the whole columnist page is ridiculous as set up, but for monetary reasons it’s not going to go away. One can certainly argue that no one should keep the job for more than 5 years and there’s no question the Times needs to use a tighter leash. But Krugman shows that it can be done.

So who do you want? I keep Krugman and Brooks. Everyone else is gone without a second thought. Why Brooks? You have to have conservatives. And he actually does represent a certain type of Beltway constituency. He’s terrible, but again, he’s terrible in the right way. Plus he’s fun to make fun of. If you can nominate a conservative to replace him, go ahead.

Who else would I want on my Times fantasy columnist page? Despite what he says about not wanting the job, Ta-Nehisi Coates is on board. He’s too modest. Dahlia Lithwick would be awesome as well, as Scott has argued for years. Since I’m a historian, let’s add Jill Lepore. She consistently connects past and present, works hard, and is incredibly productive. Since we are dumping Friedman, we need a foreign policy person. How about Fallows? We are already raiding the Atlantic here, might as well complete the job. I’ll note that Lydia DePillis is the best writer over at WonkBlog (Evan “Unions Are Evil” Soltas is the worst. Typically, he’s the one going with Klein to his new and seemingly very centrastic site) and could be good and have a large enough platform for consideration, as well as being diverse enough in topic to not just be another Krugman. Could we add Dave Weigel as the other conservative? Is he conservative enough? I think all of these people have significant VORC potential.

I’m not picking any of several excellent choices on economic issues (DeLong, Hiltzik, etc). And this page is too white. But it’s a start. Who else should be on board?