Did some googling on various permutation of the exact phrase “conservative (newspaper name here) columnist” and found:

• “… New York Times…” — 564 hits (Safire, Brooks) — we also noted only 440 hits for “liberal …” for an editorial page that hosts Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman!

• “… Washington Post …” — 130 hits (Will, Krauthammer, and others)

• “… Chicago Sun-Times …” — 35 hits (Novak, Byrne, Roeser)

• “… Boston Globle …” — 38 hits (Jeff Jacoby)

and, amusingly and unsurprisingly …

• “… Los Angeles Times …” - 1 hit — an old reference to — of all people — Arianna Huffington!

The fact that no one — really, no one — thinks the LA Times has any conservative voice on the op-ed pages shows just how far that section has to go to shake the perception that it’s a lefty echo chamber.

We’re want to give new hire David Gelernter, who hasn’t been properly villified with the ‘conservative’ tag yet, a chance. But he’s not a staff columnist. Op-ed is a side gig for him (in real life he’s a professor of computer science at Yale) and his columns to date lack heft.

The same lack of institutional commitment is true for Max Boot. It’s nice that he gets space once a week, and that Tribune cuts him a check for his column, but he’s not on staff.

If Michael Kinsley wants to get serious about building a more dynamic editorial and opinion section — which should include providing a voice for the 35% of LA County who didn’t vote for John Kerry — they should look for a writer the caliber of Mark Steyn, Michael Barone, or Brooks — and hire them. That would add a catalyst to Kinsley’s ongoing experiments.

Technorati Tags: conservative opinion, LA Times, Los Angeles Times, media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 at 6:00 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Los Angeles Times, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.