By Brian Montopoli
Three days after Election Day, an op-ed article was published, written by Frank Pastore, a former professional baseball player who is now the afternoon host on a Christian talk radio station. You probably missed it — but if you did, don’t be too broken up.
The left wing in American politics, wrote Pastore, is an “evil ideology” that “hates the ballot box.” It “bewitches with its potions and elixirs,” and “vomits upon the morals, values and traditions that we hold sacred.” “We are the greatest force for good in the world,” he wrote, “despite what the left, the terrorists or the United Nations” claim. Conservatives, he implored, should not to listen to people “beseeching the victor to compromise with the vanquished.” (In something of an aside, he also claimed that John Kerry and John Edwards personally reject God, a contention that might surprise both.)
So where did this piece of bile run? WorldNetDaily? NewsMax? The Bob Jones University Alumni Magazine?
Nope. Try the Los Angeles Times, the widely acclaimed standard bearer of journalism on the West Coast. In its well-publicized quest for conservative voices, the Times hasn’t limited itself to hyperbolic screeds full of religiously tinged inflammatory language and unsupported and offensive claims. It has also turned to outright frauds — people like John Lott. Lott, you might recall, “almost certainly fabricated a mysterious survey and certainly behaved unethically in making claims for which he had no supporting data,” as Tim Lambert puts it. Lott also posed as a person named “Mary Rosh,” under whose name he posted hundreds of jeremiads on the Internet, attacking his critics and praising his own work — sometimes lying in the process. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Last February, before many of the charges came to light, the Times ran an op-ed co-authored by Lott. In November, under the direction of Michael Kinsley, who became editorial and opinion editor in June, it ran another, “Breaking the Siege in the Judge War.”
The Times’ list of dubious op-eds doesn’t end there. On Dec. 12, the Times editorial page ran a piece by Thomas J. Krannawitter suggesting that Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is racist. Just this week, it printed one from Nick Schulz, the editor of Tech Central Station. A year ago, Nick Confessore exposed Tech Central Station as a lobbying organization masquerading as a journalistic one. Schultz’s piece — which included the line “[a]t some level, science probably will never resolve what to do about global warming” — appeared designed to muddy the waters around the issue. Tech Central Station is partially sponsored by ExxonMobil, which opposes legislation that would regulate gases that contribute to global warming.
What’s going on here? Why is the Times offering up its prestigious pages to contributors with this kind of baggage? The Washington Post receives 60 to 100 submissions a day, and the Times gets its fair share as well. The Cato Institute, among other think tanks, is full of people willing and able to craft serious, thoughtful op-eds from a conservative perspective. Despite what some liberals have come to believe, there are serious conservative thinkers in America, many of whom would jump at the chance for a national platform.
“We run all different kind of things, from a wide spectrum of contributors, to show the breadth of what people are thinking and talking about,” says Nick Goldberg, op-ed editor at the Times.
The presence of people like Pastore in the paper certainly gives readers a sense of true believers far and wide — even the ones who invoke potions and elixirs. Perhaps the editors of op-ed pages, despite presiding over ostensible oases of ideas, feel pressure from media bias warriors to represent all parties, even at the occasional expense of quality arguments.
Ironically, some who see a pervasive liberal media bias at places like the Los Angeles Times believe that editors like Kinsley are giving Pastore a voice precisely because they recognize the weakness of the arguments those writers advance. Readers, after all, are less likely to be won over by cartoon conservatism than the clearheaded version. (Certainly, there are conservatives who darkly suspect that the New York Times has been happy to keep William Safire in its pages precisely because the editors find his work unimpressive and unconvincing.)
Of course, Los Angeles Times watchers might make the same argument, albeit from a different ideological perspective, about Robert Scheer, a longtime liberal columnist for the paper who specializes in “twisting the facts to fit [his] ideology,” according to Spinsanity. And, in fairness to the Times, the paper more often than not runs insightful op-eds. (Full disclosure: I wrote an op-ed for the Times, prior to Kinsley’s arrival.) But given that the op-ed page editors of newspapers like the Times have, over time, disproportionately favored liberal viewpoints, shouldn’t they at least allot their conservative slots — every single time — to commentators who are persuasive and credible? Or who, at the very least, bring to the table serious arguments worth chewing over?
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.