The New York Times loves the public sector, and it mimics our most dysfunctional governments in one respect: it is just about impossible to get fired.
Consider Times opinion columnists Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, Nick Kristof and Maureen Dowd. They have all been at the Times for something like fifty years, and none of that quartet has had a fresh idea in at least the last decade. Does anyone still read them? I remember as recently as 2006 there were controversies over a number of Dowd columns, and the Krugman Truth Squad catalogued Krugman’s howlers. But no one bothers anymore.
Today the Times published a column by Maureen Dowd that took off from an amnesiac premise:
Put aside the parochial partisan presumption that the McCain/Palin ticket in 2008 doesn’t count, and let’s grant that 2016 seems like a long time ago. Any way you look at it, Dowd’s assertion is an inexplicable blunder. Twitchy collects some of those who had fun at the Times’s expense, including Hillary Clinton, whose tweet-writer got off this amusing jab at Dowd:
Either @TimKaine and I had a very vivid shared hallucination four years ago or Maureen had too much pot brownie before writing her column again. https://t.co/J3SSwtkg7x
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 8, 2020
The Times has now posted a correction. Maureen, for her part, is perhaps happy to see that there are a few who still care. But for me, this episode illustrates once again the apparent absence of any editorial oversight at papers like the Times. Does the Times actually employ editors? It is hard to imagine that anyone other than Dowd laid eyes on her column before it saw the light of day. The Times strikes me as a press organization in a state of terminal decline.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.