So we were mostly out of the office when Salon published “The War Room Hack Thirty,” a list of what Alex Pareene has dubbed the “worst columnists and cable news commentators America has to offer.” Needless to say, there were some breaths of relief in the office when we’d read through it today and seen that none of our names were featured.
Here are some highlights from the fun-to-read, blunt, stick-it-in-deep-and-twist-it list of mostly old-world print-y pundits.
On number ten, Peggy Noonan:
Peggy Noonan might be the single funniest Op-Ed writer currently working, and for that I do, honestly, respect her. Her red wine-and-laudanum-inspired tales of wandering the Upper East Side in search of some clue to the Contemporary American Mood, her ability to wring a column out of the phenomenon of seeing a Mexican, her sentence fragments and Golden Books prose — all of this makes for a reliably entertaining Friday read. It’s certainly much more fun than a Krauthammer column.
On number eleven, George Will:
George Will is a sanctimonious moralist, a pretentious hypocrite, a congenital liar and a boring pundit, to boot.
On number eighteen, Tina Brown:
While it’s obviously fun to focus on Tina Brown the larger-than-life media character—launcher of overhyped money-losing media properties, employer of close friends, big-spending fleecer of publishers, clueless throwback with no clue how the Internet works—her output as an author and pundit is bad enough without getting into her plans to cannibalize Newsweek, her latest editorial toy.
And on number twenty-two, Tucker Carlson:
A long time ago, Tucker Carlson was a good journalist. He wrote interesting magazine features with actual reporting involved. TV had a hand in ruining him, but his essential dickishness consumed him.
Full disclosure: Carlson has promised to destroy me. (In those words!) (He also said “I will destroy you” to a video store clerk he got fired for blogging about how Tucker Carlson had opened an account at his video store.)
We don’t necessarily agree with all of Salon’s choices—leave Matt Bai alone!—but it should set tongues wagging.
Alternatively, if you’re in the mood to give thanks, The Nation’s Greg Mitchell has compiled an alternative list of “30 Media Heroes” to swoon to. Voters chimed in on Twitter, via e-mail, and in Mitchell’s comments section, pasting together a list that includes Matt Taibi, Salon’s own Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, nearly every MSNBC personality, and is topped by that network’s 9 p.m. star, Rachel Maddow. It is, after all, The Nation.
Ugh. Matt Bai is the worst kind of boring political hack. Jonathan Bernstein over at Plain Blog has a biweekly feature on Bai's extreme hackery -- Bernstein is wont to title it "Oy,Bai." You should read it some time. Here's a classic:
http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2010/08/oy-bai.html
Bai isn'a hack of the Halperin type, it's just that he's angling for the David Broder Seat, specializing in pearl clutching and handwringing, making up scenarios and motivations out of thin air, pulling predictions out of various orifices in the most superficial way, smugly believing he is the very most smartest, gifted, wisest guy in the room: Classic High Broderism.
But don't take my word for it, read Bernstein on Bai.
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 30 Nov 2010 at 10:13 AM
Bernstein on Bai is always good, and James is right that that's a classic example, because it notes both the oddity of the Times thinking this sort of political column is still essential and that Bai was the right person to write it. He's got a lot of gifts -- he's written plenty of interesting feature stories -- but his political analysis tends to be both predictable and misleading. And the format seems weirdly archaic, in that Bai's own views about politics very clearly influence what he writes -- the thing that's most Broderish about his output is the conceit that his perspective is widely shared by the public -- but unlike a blog the format doesn't allow (or compel) him to engage with criticism.
#2 Posted by Greg Marx, CJR on Tue 30 Nov 2010 at 10:37 AM
Was it only a couple of weeks ago that Salon's own staffers turned up a Mickey Kaus column that predicted, 13 months in advance, almost everything that was to transpire on the subsequent political calendar? Now he's on Salon's 'hack' list - though as a Democrat who makes fun of his own party's liberal pieties, Kaus is practically sui generis among political observers. Republican pundits who do this get what amused conservative activists call the 'strange new respect' treatment from the achingly predictable MSM machine.
The 'hacks' are the ones who phone in the moment's DC conventional wisdom - who fell for Obama very hard, who predicted the death of the GOP (happens every time the Dems have a good election day), who continue to over-estimate the health of white liberalism and its pet issues, and correspondingly underestimate the resilience of its skeptics and opponents. 'Hacks' tend to take PR handouts from interest groups and build a column around them, over and over again. Anna Quindlen is my template for someone whose column I could write myself - just give me a subject. But give me a press handout from a left-wing group, and I'll write you a Bob Herbert column.
I notice Joel does not share the name of the 'winner' of the top position with its readers. But he does have space to snigger at Noonan, Will, Tucker Carlson - and a single non-'conservative', social butterfly Tina Brown. Once more, I learn more about the predictable political outlooks of CJR's staff (hip, urban, snarky, etc.) than about the topics they profess to discuss. We get it, Joel. You are a New York media person. You are not reliably pro-Democratic, but you are reliably anti-Republican.
#3 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 30 Nov 2010 at 05:11 PM
George Will's description.. I don't agree.
http://scholarshipsforwomenguide.com
#4 Posted by Michael, CJR on Tue 30 Nov 2010 at 05:23 PM
Ugh! I finally got a look at the "Media Heroes" list. It's embarrassing, really.
I don't want to rate them numerically -- it's impossible, really -- but right on top of my Media Hero list would go David Cay Johnston, Charlie Savage, Dana Priest, Olivier Knox, James Fallows, Mark Danner, Paul Krugman -- there are too many great ones to name. Maddow and Moyers from that list would be in there. I ought to put Chittum in there somewhere, he's a terrific business journo, but I'm still pissed about that cheap shot "rage-filled blowhard" so he's out, for now. I'm embarrassingly forgetting scores of great journos. Way too many great ones come before almost anyone on Mitchell's list, IM very HO, of course.
Anyone?
#5 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 30 Nov 2010 at 08:37 PM
HAhaahHahAHAH!
Matt Taibbi when David Gergen thought he was Matt Bai:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/232460?RS_show_page=1
"Gergen: If Obama is going to govern as well as prosper politically, he has to pivot back toward the center. He must embrace some sort of Social Security reform, just as Clinton did with NAFTA, even though his base will scream about it. He must also enlarge his inner circle by bringing in people who have the trust of the business community. One of the surprises for me has been that even though Obama rescued the banks, the alienation of the business community has reached a point that is threatening the recovery. Business people are sitting on a lot of money and not investing it because there is so much uncertainty about taxes, health care, financial regulations and energy. Obama's got to be more of a partner with the business community.
Taibbi: I have to disagree. The notion that the business community is disappointed with Obama because of what he's done in the past two years, I just don't see that. They're sitting on a lot of money, but they're sitting on it because he gave it to them.
Gergen: You don't think they're disappointed?
Taibbi: I'm sure they would have preferred the Republican agenda, where they would get 100 percent of what they want. Under Obama, they only got 90 percent. He bailed out the banks and didn't put anybody in jail. He gave $13 billion to Goldman Sachs under the AIG bailout alone and then did nothing when Goldman turned around and gave themselves $16 billion in bonuses. He passed a financial-reform bill that contains no significant reforms and doesn't really address the issue of "too big to fail." FDR, in the same position, passed radical reforms that really put Wall Street and the business community under his heel.
Gergen: If you talk to many CEOs, you'll find that they're very hostile toward Obama.
Taibbi: Who cares what these CEOs think? I don't care — they're 1/1,000th of a percent of the electorate. They're the problem. Obama needs to get other people's votes, not their votes.
Gergen: It's not their votes he needs to get — it's their investments and jobs...
Taibbi: So if we put people in jail for committing fraud during the mortgage bubble, we're endangering our ability to win over the CEOs? Obama should have made sure that there are consequences for people who committed crimes. Instead, he pursued a policy of nonaction, and that left him vulnerable with ordinary people who wanted an explanation for why the economy went off the cliff.
Gergen: I don't think his problem is he hasn't put enough people in jail. I agree that when people commit fraud, they ought to spend some time in the slammer. But there's a tendency in today's Democratic Party to turn away from someone like Bob Rubin because of his time at Citigroup. I served with him during the Clinton administration, when the country added 22 million new jobs, and Bob Rubin was right at the center of that. He was an invaluable adviser to the president, and he is now arguing that one of the reasons this economy is not coming back is that the business community is sitting on money because of the hostility they feel coming from Washington.
Taibbi: I'm sorry, but Bob Rubin is exactly what I'm talking about. Under Clinton, he pushed this enormous remaking of the rules for Wall Street specifically so the Citigroup merger could go through, then he went to work for Citigroup and made $120 million over the next 10 years. He helped push through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which deregulated the derivatives market and created the mortgage bubble. Then Obama brings him back into the government during the transition and surrounds himself with people who are close to Bob Rubin. That's exactly the wrong message to be sending to o
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 11 Dec 2010 at 04:06 AM