Presswatch: The Demise of Columnists
Corry, John
to something else. As the sentence it's replacing is not one I wrote anyway, I don't care. But the Times feels it needs to keep me fully informed of these concerns, usually in the wee small hours,...
...But then James Reston, the chief of the Washington bureau, and a columnist himself, stepped in...
...According to Bob Herbert, the Republicans had conducted a "relentlessly prurient pursuit of the President," showed "contempt for the voters," and "lined up like lackeys to pursue the right wing's lead...
...Who knows...
...according to what might or might not be acceptable in the acidly easygoing wisecracks of the Press Club bar and the parties at which they entertained one another...
...Let us stretch a point now, and think of this as a legitimate viewpoint, although that still leaves us with the problem of hysteria...
...Herbert is always angry...
...When Baker's column, "Observer," first appeared, his byline was not at the top, but the bottom of the column...
...Indeed, even though his column had brought Baker a modicum of fame, as well as a Pulitzer Prize, in his farewell piece he barely mentioned it...
...Watch Baker as the host of "Masterpiece Theater," and you can still get the picture...
...But nothing the Times has to offer can compensate for what they've taken away from me...
...Dowd, for example, is either bored, distressed, or just fed up...
...Besides, while ordinarily you might feel sorry for Livingston being outed, he and his colleagues had practically invited Larry Flynt in themselves "by focusing so single-handedly on Mr...
...The columns the day after Clinton was impeached and Bob Livingston stepped down as speaker-designate offered prime examples...
...It has given way to attitude...
...If I'd stuck at it, it might have led to a regular column once every 18 months...
...48 February 1999 • The American Spectator was still one of Reston's boys...
...Almost anyone can express an opinion now, of course, but 1962 was a foreign country...
...Therefore it was a minor landmark in 1959, when Alan Drury, then a Times Washington bureau reporter, published the bestselling novel Advice and Consent...
...But that's London...
...His column was cut back from twice a week to once...
...Then he went on to write about how much he loved newspapers, and about all the good things that working for newspapers had brought him...
...Presumably that explains why, in his farewell column, he could barely mention the name of his employer...
...Conservatives wanted only to drop the bomb on Moscow, and get fluoride out of the water supply...
...But Baker went on for 36 years, and while he was seldom very funny, he was for the most part entertaining, and despite his occasional, and sometimes mean-spirited, outbursts of liberal sanctimony, he was almost always civilized...
...In other words, Reston and his boys wrote for their readers, but this new bunch writes for itself...
...The closed-mind accusation, of course, was delicious, and Herbert did not seem to be the slightest bit self-conscious when he made it...
...Clinton's sex life...
...The problem, however, is that this demands more empathy than most of us can muster, and so after a while, the new bunch, rather than being provocative or enlightening, seems merely tedious...
...he said, "what happened...
...In 1962, Baker's ascension from reporter to columnist was a serious matter...
...I'm honored," he told me...
...had filleted my copy for the Times and rewritten not just my sentences but his quotes, it didn't sound much like either of us...
...They were "crazed with hatred of the President," and "bent on a high-tech lynching," and even the "looniest Democrat" made far more sense in the impeachment debate than any of them did...
...The dreary thing about that, though, is that Drury was commenting on an earlier and sounder era, and the new bunch has made it all worse...
...He remembered his past, and said he had met captains and kings, and been places he would never have been otherwise...
...Newsmagazines were sober, while the Web was unborn, and a chance to express your opinion in a column actually meant something...
...ing his early days as a reporter with more sentiment than they deserved—old newspapemien often do that—but it may also be he realized that writing a column no longer was important...
...Obviously she did not like the Republicans, either...
...But the sequence today is reversed, and even analysis is not what it used to be...
...The same passions and impulses keep getting recycled, and you realize you have heard them all before...
...It said, among other things, that the Washington press corps slanted the news so it favored liberal Democrats...
...It may be he was investJOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent and regular Press-watch columnist...
...Meanwhile columnist Anna Quindlen has come and gone, taking her odd feminism with her, and been replaced by Maureen Dowd and Bob Herbert...
...There's too much hate here," she wrote...
...Perhaps I'd have been happy to put up with being abused by the Times every two years...
...For one thing, the press was the press then, and not the amorphous media...
...I bumped into him on the street a few weeks after it appeared...
...They know the White House is a mess, and suspect Bill Clinton may be depraved, but they are sure all that palls when compared with the wickedness of conservative Republicans...
...But more important, Reston's boys, and Reston himself, all shared the same political orthodoxy: The only good Republican was a Rockefeller Republican, and virtue made its home mostly among liberal Democrats...
...Careful readers noticed, however, that Baker mentioned the Times only once—he said his Uncle Allen always bought it on Sundays — and that his happy recollections of the past all sprang from the time, years before, when he was a reporter...
...By the time Miss Stevens & Co...
...Baker himself fell out of favor at the paper long before he retired...
...As a reporter in the Times Washington bureau, Baker had written deft, graceful news stories, although a column was different, and Times editors did not know if he would have the rightstuff to do one...
...S o another difference between then and now: Columnists, Times columnists, anyway, once put factual material first, and analysis second...
...Consequently the Times hesitated about accommodating Baker, even though he threatened to jump to the Baltimore Sun if it didn't...
...The thinking was that if Baker failed, and the column were killed, fewer readers would notice its absence, and neither the Times nor Baker would be embarrassed...
...Baker was one of his boys, and Reston prevailed on the Times publisher to make room for him on the editorial page...
...At the same time, their political ordinates, Frank Rich's, too, are simplistic...
...They knew the editorial page needed brightening, but even though Baker wanted to write a humor column, Times tradition was such that even a humor column, or perhaps a humor column, especially, was not to be taken lightly...
...Moreover, the Republicans were "arrogant," "extremist," and "absolutist," and their "minds were closed...
...Or as Alan Drury once wrote about Washington journalists in general, they would "report and interpret events...
...In fact, Baker and Mary McGrory, then with the Washington Evening Star, even wrote blurbs for Drury's novel...
...The orthodoxy was never explicitly stated, but it was widely understood, and while no Times-man was likely to admit it, and perhaps not even be consciously aware of it, it clearly influenced the paper's coverage...
...Untilthey restore WQEW to the airwaves, until the Times and Disney—the two most malign influences in America today—end their unholy, hellish non-bargainbasement alliance, I will never write for the paper again...
...After all, times have changed since 1962, when Baker wrote his first column...
...So we are a long way here from when Reston and his boys pulled their chins,made their pronouncements, and hardly ever wrote in the first person...
...It's time to take a stand...
...Two years ago I interviewed the late actor Daniel Massey for the Times...
...Reston's boys had the occasional tantrum, but this new bunch seems to have nervous breakdowns...
...I can live with a relaxed attitude to perjury and obstruction of justice, but when they deprive a guy of Keely Smith singing "What Is This Thing Called Love...
...Come to think of it, I won't even buy it...
...Nonetheless it would still be a close-run thing...
...The American Spectator • February 1999 49...
...Frank Rich, of course, remains...
...My God...
...And I hate it...
...Dowd at least knows something about national politics, while Herbert and Rich seem to know nothing at all, although that never stops them from writing about it...
...Reston's boys, on the other hand—Baker, Tom Wicker, and yes, even Anthony Lewis —may have gotten things wrong, but they usually knew something about what they were talking about in their columns...
...Reston did not agree with that, and said as much publicly, and Drury resigned from the Times that same year...
...that's personal...
...Dowd said the whole spectacle depressed her beyond all measure, and she yearned for it to go away...
...But that was then, and the ethos at the Times and elsewhere has changed...
...PRESSWATCH by John Corry The Demise of Columnists Russell Baker announced his departure as a New York Times columnist on Christmas, a day, he wrote, "in which nobody reads a newspaper anyhow...
...I love your stuff in the Telegraph...
...On the other hand, these were still civilized times, and there was no nasty feuding...
...But the Times feels it needs to keep me fully informed of these concerns, usually in the wee small hours, when presumably AT&T gives them a discount rate...
...Television was in its adolescence, and there were few talking heads, and none at all who shouted...
...Point of reference: I was around then, too, and I know...
...This new bunch takes things more personally, and insists that we share its deep feelings...
...Meanwhile, directly beneath Herbert on the op-ed page was Dowd...
...As Washington bureau chief, Reston had specialized in recruiting other young reporters just like him: tweedy, usually lean, and more often than not pipe-smoking...
...In spirit, he Reflections on the retirement of Russell Baker...
Vol. 32 • February 1999 • No. 2
