Matt Yglesias

Fred Hiatt’s Strange Op-Ed

There’s an awful lot wrong with this op-ed from Washington Post editorial page honcho Fred Hiatt, but I’ll just remark on his extremely strange opening graf:

For moderate voters clinging to some faith in government, the question over the past two decades of mostly two-party rule was: Can’t Washington do anything?

Now, with one party pretty much in control, the question has become both more hopeful and more anxious: Will Washington do anything responsibly?

It seems to me that we had “one party pretty much in control” in the opening months of 2001, as well as throughout the years 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. Has Hiatt forgotten about this? It honestly wasn’t very long ago. Meanwhile, throughout the course of an article castigating irresponsibility on the part of the current congressional majority, Hiatt doesn’t see fit to so much as mention the blanket opposition to everything that’s been coming from the minority. On Waxman-Markey, for example, if conservative legislators were working assiduously to make the bill more efficient, then we would get a more efficient bill. Instead, they’re opposing any effort to limit carbon emissions, which results in the need to make some unfortunate compromises to broaden support among Democrats, and then using those compromises as a bad-faith rationale for attacking the bill. That’s the fundamental underlying dynamic, and it’s totally missing from Hiatt’s piece.

Of course for an editor who doesn’t seem to mind if his columnists like Michael Gerson just make stuff up, I suppose that simply interpreting events in an odd and misleading way is a kind of progress.

Fred Hiatt Won’t Correct Dishonest Climate Change Columns, Will Lecture Congress on How to Handle Climate Change

An excellent point from Dave Roberts:

The Washington Post editorial board, which just this weekend elected to run a column from George Will denying climate change entirely, now presumes to lecture Barbara Boxer on how to solve it.

The classic post-war American newspaper has been largely insulated from market pressure and competition. Typically, you’d have a city and the city would have a newspaper. People could choose to subscribe to the newspaper, or they could choose not to. But they couldn’t choose a different paper. You just had to decide, as a citizen and as an individual, if you wanted to be the sort of person who read his town’s broadsheet or else if you didn’t want to be that sort of person. Thus, the audience was guaranteed and, at the time, so was the advertising. Under the circumstances, papers were remarkably free to just do whatever they wanted to do with their actual content.

When you talk about this with working journalists and newspaper nostalgics, there’s a tendency to focus on the upsides of this insulation from market competition. You could dispatch some reporters to work on a Pulitzer-contending feature or major investigation and not really worry too much if the marginal increase in readership justified the cost. You could keep a Moscow bureau open just because you thought it was important. All good stuff. But it’s also bread this weird arrogance where nobody in the business seems to think that the deplorably low quality of the product plays any role whatsoever in the declining relevance of these institutions. But here’s a George Will column in my paper, lying to me about global warming. Here’s Will’s editor refusing to correct the record or say anything about why he decided it would be a good idea to run a column in which George Will lies about global warming. And now here’s the very same indifferent-to-the-truth editorial team writing about global warming. And I’m supposed to read the editorial why? What value to me, as a consumer of information, do inaccurate uncorrected George Will columns offer me? How will the addition of Bill Kristol to the roster increase the value of the newspaper to me as a consumer of information?

These issues don’t get considered, at all. These guys are Important Conservatives so it’s important that we pay them to lie to people.

Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel

It turns out that beyond his serious distortions regarded the alleged “global cooling” scare of the 1970s, George Will’s latest climate change denialist article contained some very clear-cut factual errors. He said that the Arctic Climate Research Center had found that global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979, but that group disagrees with Will. Will also claimed that the World Meteorological Organization says there’s been no global warming over the past ten years, when in fact the WMO says no such thing. They say that 1998 was the hottest year on record, and also that the world is experiencing a warming trend. Zach Roth has been trying to get some kind of response to this out of Will or out of Fred Hiatt:

Will’s assistant told us that Will might get back to us later in the day to talk about the column. And Hiatt said he was too busy to talk about it just then, but that he’d try to respond to emailed questions. So we emailed him yesterday’s post, with several questions about the editing process, then followed up with another email late yesterday afternoon.

But still nothing from either of them, over twenty-four hours after the first contact was made. Nor has the online version of Will’s column been updated, even to reflect the fact that the ACRC has utterly disavowed the claim Will attributes to it.

We’re hearing that the Post’s editing process for opinion pieces is virtually non-existent. Maybe that makes sense in some cases — it certainly seems reasonable to give most columnists a freer hand than straight news reporters get. But it’s difficult to know for sure when the Post won’t talk about it. And that approach sure didn’t serve the paper well here.

I think Roth is being too-cute-by-half here. The point of giving columns to Will and Charles Krauthammer and now hiring Bill Kristol is to show that Fred Hiatt and The Washington Post believe that whatever random crap the conservative movement wants to make up on any given day will get a hearing in The Washington Post. They’re not interested in informing their audience, they’re interested in showing that they’ll bend over backwards to be fair to the right wing. Publishing error-free articles by movement icons serves that purpose, but publishing sloppy error-filled ones serves that purpose even better.

Diversity, Hiatt-Style

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, shining star of your liberal media, says:

Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt called Kristol “very smart and very plugged in,” saying Kristol would be an influential voice in the coming debate over redefining the Republican Party. “It seems to me there were a lot of Times readers who felt the Times shouldn’t hire someone who supported the Iraq war,” said Hiatt, adding that he wants “a diverse range of opinions” on his page.

Even absent Kristol, the Times will have among its op-ed columnists Iraq War supporter David Brooks. And it will also have Iraq War supporter Thomas Friedman as its dedicated foreign affairs columnist. So it’s hardly as if Iraq War supporters have been purged from the NYT. Meanwhile, what kind of diversity has Hiatt really brought to the Post’s opinion section? His masthead editorials backed the war, as did all of his conservative columnists and most of the “liberal” columnists. A believer in diversity would be trying to get some company for poor E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson among the liberals.

The fascinating thing about this, though, is that Hiatt combines contempt for newspaper readers with contempt for the craft of journalism. He clearly thinks it was bad of the Times to cater to the desires of its readers. And he doesn’t say Kristol’s column is good! Doesn’t call it insightful, doesn’t call it informative, doesn’t call it well-written. He just says that Kristol is “plugged-in” and influential. Which no doubt he is. But as a consumer of media, I prefer to take in well-written informative commentary that’s entertaining or enlightening. Being deliberately misled by influence-peddlers or wannabe influence-peddlers doesn’t rank high on my priority list. But to Hiatt it’s the very model of a modern major political pundit.