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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Punditry is a kind of journalism, but far from the most important kind; what people get from Salon today they can get better from a hundred different newsletters.

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I think the most damning fact about the readers of The New York Times is that they're much more interested in the opinion page (which is just Charlie Blow blowing it out his ass) than they are in the actual reporting which might concern some people you don't know in some place you never heard of that did something that involves a lot of explaining.

This is Maureen Dowd erasure. Please respect one of the GOATs of vapid, internally-inconsistent nonsense. She's an absolute legend.

Nor can we forget David Brooks, the moralizing conservative who left his wife for his research assistant 24 years his junior.

David French accusing Mayor Pete of fixing bread prices, Lulu Garcia-Navarro with more glasses than good faith questions, etc.

Say what you will, but the NYT has a deep bench of shenanigans. They truly love the game.

David French is a weird person to single out here. Dowd and Brooks don't have any real identities outside of being vapid pundits; French is a former movement conservative (and litigator) who was defenestrated for opposing the rise of Trump. You don't have to like him --- I don't read him --- but he's not really at all like Dowd or Brooks. When you make that comparison, you weaken your point, because it sounds like your real problem with NYT opinion staffing is that it includes right-of-center voices.

If you just wanted people to agree with you, Salon definitely had you covered!

You think that based on my view that the NYT Opinion section is a clown car, I therefore want to only read people who agree with me?

The NYT happens to staff people on the intellectual right, which is whatever. It's a core part of who they are. My issue is lack of intellectual rigor.

I can say personally I like David Brooks a lot more than I liked him 10 years ago but he left the Times to go work for The Atlantic.

Genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about. David French joined NYT in 2023 and was already an independent. He is not at all a foil and is basically in lockstep with his more left of center cohosts like Jamelle Bouie (who is apparently a fascist, according to the median Bluesky poster). This idea that he’s a right of center contributor to NYT is based entirely on work from before he was there. The only person who was right of center in NYT opinion was Ross Douthat and he’s already gone.

David brooks was never that heavy on moralizing, imho. He was more of an idealist who saw a vision for society that he conceded could never be realized , but was content with people otherwise acting in accordance with their incentives and preferences.

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