Columbia, Gem of the Ocean
One time one of my closest conservative relatives tried to start a fight with me by making a tired point about liberal bias in the media. In return I made the tired point that you’re only as liberal as the billionaire who pays your salary. We both continued to make tired points. Finally he asks me, with the air of a man who has played his trump card, “New York Times. Conservative or liberal?”
I think he was a little surprised by the speed with which I said “conservative on fiscal and foreign policy, weakly liberal on everything else.” That was a lot of years ago. Now I would be tempted not to add the second bit.
That’s not to say there’s no good work being done there. “Good” is a comparative term, for one thing, and when we’ve lost most of our regional papers, what’s to compare it with? That we still have more than one major newspaper is something we must be thankful for. And even on the editorial side, I admire Lydia Polgreen, and Jamelle Bouie; Ezra Klein’s show is good; I think Ross Douthat is worth arguing with; I even think David Brooks has preserved an amount of sincerity that is a little startling for someone in his position. (Still, if they’re looking for “heterodox conservatives” to beguile and surprise their readership with, I wish they’d hire Eve Tushnet.) But this is a center-right paper.
I felt deep disgust when I saw Pamela Paul’s editorial supporting the crackdown on student protests that took place at Columbia University yesterday. There are a variety of tired (and true) points I could make, like “I thought you liked free speech, Pam” and “It’s crazy that a university president would go on record with the statement that students have a right not to hear ideas that bother them,” but the idea of doing that makes me, well, tired. Ganz made some people mad the other day by writing about the Jodi Dean case. (For the record, I hated her piece, for most of the same reasons he does. There’s something incredibly lame about both demanding and repudiating the protections of liberal society. They should also put her back in the classroom immediately.) He remarked: “It’s long been my contention that the number of people who actually have a principled commitment to free speech is next to zero: what people mostly believe is that they should be freely allowed to tell others to shut their mouths.” Certainly Paul’s editorial is a case in point. She seems to feel that the war against cancel culture on campus is being won because a college administrator … suppressed some speech she doesn’t like.
New York Times: conservative or liberal? It’s probably more honest to say that, if this large daily publication were figured as a single person with a single point of view, it would be this: the liberal with an id. The kind of liberal who would eat canapés with Pinochet. “We disagree on many things,” our liberal says, spraying bits of chewed garnish everywhere. Somewhere in the basement, a trade unionist screams.