sign in sign up
<<
Home , Kathleen Parker, Leonard Pitts, The Kansas City Star

Constant Comment How became America’s most-read woman columnist by Kerry Howley

ave the Males, Kathleen Parker’s 2008 polemic on a ticket to see me in Oklahoma City. I give a speech sexual permissiveness and libertinism, contains the out there, and it’s standing room only, 1,300 people.” following euphemisms for vagina: “inner sanctum,” Twenty-two years after she started writing columns “familiars,” “you know what,” “very private parlor,” and 14 years after the Tribune Company started selling “sacred vessel,” “vestal vestibule,” and “hirsute abyss her as a conservative voice befitting a well-rounded op-ed Sof God’s little oven.” We will be, laments Parker in her obliga- page, Washington is finally getting to know Parker. Oddly, a tory chapter on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, so “awash good bit of that newfound notoriety among East Coast elites in vaginaism,” that we are nothing beyond “vaginas on the might be attributed to , the anti-establishment plain seeking out other vaginas with which to hold hands vice-presidential candidate about whom Parker wrote a much- and gaze unlongingly into the silky night of a manless moon.” discussed column last September. Parker has since ascended We have abandoned a better, gentler America, a place where to the hallowed space of op-ed page women were “above this sort of thing,” a nation where men did and has become somewhat of a regular on Sunday cable-news not “talk about vaginas in public.” programs such as , where she sits to For a woman who clearly loves to talk about sex but feels the right on a select panel of opinion providers. compelled to deride the vulgarization of public discourse, there Where Parker is known, she is known as an acerbic, is perhaps nothing to do but write a book about the hot, wet, 50-something, right-leaning commentator—disparaging of carnal sins of Ensler and Lindsay Lohan. And Save the Males’ political correctness, supportive of military engagement, deri- contribution to the culture it professes to despise is only the sive of what she takes to be an overly sensitive populace. “If most obvious of its internal contradictions. It adheres to no a 5-foot-6-inch, 115-pound middle-aged woman of Northern known ideology, which is to say it resembles the thinking of European extraction with shoulder-length, tastefully high- the vast majority of Americans. Its only organizing principle is lighted hair and dark-brown eyes who speaks English with that most enigmatic of moral guideposts, “common sense.” a slight Southern accent recently had hijacked an airplane Parker is a phenomenally successful defender of “common and killed thousands of people,” she told readers in a Sept. sense” in all its culture-bound oddity. Love her, hate her, or 26, 2001, column, “I’d gladly subject myself to extra scrutiny.” lack the foggiest idea of who she might be, she is the most She has lived in the South for most of her life and consid- widely syndicated female columnist in the nation. Data on the ers herself in touch with normal people (who are known, in reach of particular columnists is hard to come by, but a 2007 Parker-speak, as “Bubba,” as in: “I’ve always been kind of an Media Matters report ranked her third among all columnists advocate for Bubba”). in terms of the number of newspapers that carry the column, As a Post columnist Parker covers all the issues national just behind and Cal Thomas. In September of opinion writers are expected to cover, from health care to envi- 2009, according to the Washington Post Writers Group, the ronmental regulation, but her most passionate material has syndicate that distributes both Parker and Will, she was run- always been a good deal less policy-oriented, less hostage to ning in a few more papers than her colleague. These numbers “the story” as framed by the powers that be. In her early years don’t measure online reach, but they do suggest a massive as a pundit, she set herself up as a critic of contemporary femi- geographic spread. nism and what she characterized as an attack on the natural Parker’s popularity may come as a surprise to denizens of boundaries of gender. “It is little wonder that men and women D.C. and New York or anyone who prefers major papers to don’t know how to act anymore,” sighs a Jan. 25, 1989, piece. smaller ones. News organizations like “Women carry briefcases and condoms. Men wear aprons and tend to maintain their own stable of columnists; it’s the read- plant petunias.” In a Nov. 14, 1989, column, Parker reminds us ers of the Biloxi and The Kansas City Star who are that “there was a time not long ago when ‘men’s jewelry’ were likely to unfurl their rolled anachronisms to gaze upon Parker’s words not commonly used together.” We are apprised on Feb. twice-weekly syndicated opinions. “When I came to Washing- 19, 1989: “Like it or not, women do have more in common with ton,” she says, “I was already in 350 papers. Washington people each other than with men.” had never heard of me. But you’d have to stand in line to get Such faith in unschooled intuition is best delivered infor-

the american prospect 15 mally, and Parker is not one to diary December column referring dress up her down-home South- to the “oogedy-boogedy” wing of ern vocabulary. Words I learned the Republican Party, by which during the writing of this article she seemed to mean religious include “oogedy-boogedy” and social conservatives. “The GOP,” “skedaddle.” “I don’t want to say she wrote, “has surrendered its she is folksy,” Michael Murphy, a high ground to its lowest brows” former employee of the Orlando and “Southern Republicans, it Sentinel and longtime editor of seems, have seceded from sanity.” Parker’s work, told me, though She mocked Palin on The Colbert he could think of no alternative Report. National Review dumped adjective with which to describe her column. The Washington Post her style. In conversation, Park- began running it. er’s tendency toward sarcasm and “Ms. Parker is certainly not unwillingness to curse drive her a conservative anymore, hav- heavy use of the word “dadgum.” ing apparently realized it’s a lot Parker began renting a George- easier to be popular among your town studio apartment five years journalistic peers when your key- ago, and ever since she has split board tilts to the left,” Focus on her time between D.C. and South the Family’s James Dobson told Carolina, where her husband the readers of his magazine. Rick practices law. But it wasn’t until Moran, a blogger, declared Parker Sept. 26, 2008, a few weeks after “an intellectual harlot who sells Sen. John McCain announced a her conservative soul in order to certain Alaska governor as his be thought of as ‘courageous’ by running mate, that Washington both her smart set liberal and began to take notice. As Palin conservative friends.” This senti- panning goes, the column was relatively sympathetic, tagging ment seemed to be widely shared among the right-wing blogo- the vice-presidential candidate as the “antithesis of the hirsute, sphere. “I guess I can see Kathleen Parker at one of those cool Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood.” It was with disappointment, cocktail parties,” wrote the Cranky Conservative, an anony- Parker wrote, that she had come to realize how unready Palin mous blogger. “She’s the one pretending to keep up with the was, how woefully underprepared for interviews and thus for conversation because she wants to be with the ‘in’ crowd.” the role of second in command. “Only Palin can save McCain, The once-loyal columnist, it appeared, had trampled Bubba her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for per- on her way to some tony D.C. get-together. sonal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her “it’s complicated,” says parker of her disciplinarian family first.” She ended the column: “Do it for your country.” upbringing. We’re in a Georgetown coffee shop, and she peri- It was one of Parker’s best columns to date, empathetic odically glances into her purse, containing as it does a recently and intelligent, and never had she received such a response: adopted, 5-pound blind poodle named Ollie. “My mother died 20,000 e-mails in three weeks, many from enraged Palin when I was 3. Second mother, married when I was 5, divorced supporters. Parker had built a career slamming the liberal when I was 12. Third mother was just my 10th grade. I knew media elite; now, her critics alleged, she had become one of that one wasn’t going to work. The other two came after I left them. “Allow me to introduce myself,” she memorably began home. I was gone at 17. I skedaddled.” She calls herself the her next column. “I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother daughter of a Yankee pilot and a Southern belle, by which she should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since means that her father was stationed at a U.S. Air Force Base she didn’t, I should ‘off’ myself.” in South Carolina when he met her mother, a local girl. “These In alienating thousands of readers Parker also became guys fly in, they’re gorgeous, they’re the crème de la crème, and one of cable television’s favorite conservative dissenters. She they’re Yankees, so they know stuff that these girls have never showed up on Reliable Sources, Larry King Live, and Hard- seen before. And they just swept those girls off their feet.” ball to talk about Palin’s unreadiness, the right’s reaction to In Parker’s telling, her mothers were interchangeable, pass- her thoughts on Palin’s unreadiness, and her reaction to the ing through her family’s Florida home much like the camera- right’s reaction to her thoughts on Palin’s unreadiness. This toting excursionists in nearby Orlando. She speaks of them was, in short, a Southern columnist’s coming-out party. And often in the plural—mothers—a nebulous mass of female adults she wasn’t done. “[Republicans] do not … deserve to win this somehow attached to her father, whom she describes with rev-

time,” she declared in October and followed up with an incen- erence and in sharp particulars. Every night during her high tom kochel

16 november 2009 www.prospect.org school years, she and her father convened in the kitchen, he umn in which she went for a walk, was accosted by a beggar, cooking and she stationed before a mound of potatoes. Her gave the beggar $5, and concluded that $5 was not much to father lectured. She listened and peeled. “I was not encouraged pay for a nice walk. There was the March 29, 1991, column to express myself,” she recalls. “I didn’t start expressing opin- completely devoted to women’s relationship to their hair. ions around the house until—well, I never did. I tried it once; (“I also ran into the back of a man’s car while stopped at a I think it was when McGovern was running for president. My traffic light. This happened because I hated my hair.”) There father stopped speaking to me for a year and a half.” was the June 25, 1989, piece, prompted by a six-page picto- Parker earned her reporting stripes at Charleston’s Evening rial history of the bra appearing in Life magazine, in which Post and The Florida Times-Union, she set forth a parallel history of the where she reported from Palatka, “the jock strap. There was a June 12, 1992, bass capital of the world.” She profiled Kathleen Parker’s column on sexist readings of scientific the local anti-porn activist and a gui- Palin-panning processes, which began, “Once upon a tar-playing preacher. (“That’s where time, there was a sweet, helpless little I became Bubba-tolerant,” she says.) article was the kick- egg named Ovie who lived in a dark Eventually she worked her way up to off for the Southern dungeon waiting patiently to be saved the features section of the Orlando by a fearless .” Sentinel, where editor Saundra Keyes columnist’s coming- Nor was Parker, for all her worrying gave Parker her first column. out party. over gender confusion, going to be a In understanding the trajectory of downer; she is that rare cultural declin- Parker’s career, it is perhaps helpful ist with a sense of humor. “How does the to remember that even in 2009, the ratio of men to women ultimate ’80s wife become a credible ’90s woman?” she asked on opinion pages heavily favors the former. According to the in a 1992 column. “If the ’80s were characterized by shameless 2007 Media Matters report, only 29 of the 100 most-widely acquisition and self-indulgence—‘Watch Me Eat Caviar’—the syndicated newspaper columnists are women. When Parker ’90s are characterized by voyeuristic consumption of others’ was offered her column in 1987, the editors told her it would be shame and self-indulgence. ‘Let Me Watch You Dribble Caviar called “Women.” They wanted, they said, an “Anna Quindlen– All Over Your New Plastic Breasts.’ Ewwwww, that’s disgust- type” column. ing. Do it again. Yum-Yum.” This analysis doesn’t make much Parker’s column was not, in fact, Anna Quindlen–like. It more sense in context, but it was almost certainly the most was much weirder than that. There was the Oct. 9, 1988, col- interesting thing in the Orlando Sentinel that day, and it is

doesn’t, and the industry is they had read the paper the Twilight of the Op-Ed Columnist in what could charitably be day before, only 16 percent of What is the fate of the syndicated newspaper columnist called a period of transition. those under 31 said the same. in a world where online punditry is plentiful? According to the Newspa- No one knows what the per Association of America, newspaper industry will look By Paul Waldman print revenues at papers have like in 10 or 20 years, but a few plummeted, falling 17.7 per- things seem clear. The days he influential French turn to the back of our paper’s cent in 2008 from the year of 20 percent or 30 percent sociologist Gabriel A-section to get some per- before (classified-ad rev- profit margins are over. More T Tarde wrote in 1898 that spective on the news of the enue declined 29.7 percent, papers will end their print edi- newspapers “both enriched day (if we’re still getting the thanks in part to Craigslist). tions and become online-only, and leveled … the conversa- paper, that is). With the pro- Total paid daily circulation as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer tions of individuals, even liferation of news sites and has declined every year since did this year, and every news- those who do not read papers blogs, anyone can access the 1987, and last year it fell below paper will shift attention and but who, talking to those opinions of millions of com- 50 million for the first time resources to the Web. “If I had who do, are forced to follow mentators, some of whom are since 1945, when the popula- to bet money, says Rick New- the groove of their borrowed as good or better at explain- tion was less than half of what combe, the president of Cre- thoughts. One pen suffices to ing, edifying, entertaining, and it is today. And the remaining ators Syndicate, home to such set off a thousand tongues.” persuading than the lions of print audience is graying: A prominent columnists as Pat This is what the most influ- the op-ed page. survey last year from the Pew Buchanan and Mark Shields, ential op-ed columnists are So does the op-ed colum- Research Center found that “I’d say the Internet will play able to do. Yet in the age of nist have a future? while 52 percent of respon- out the way television is today” the Internet, we don’t need to Not if the newspaper dents over the age of 62 said with (continued next page)

the american prospect 17 not the work of a self-serious or particularly moralizing mind. is not and has never registered as such. It was in 1995, when Parker’s earliest columns were knocked out in a converted Parker’s column was picked up for syndication, that she became garage adjacent to her South Carolina home, where she could a designated voice of the right. “The way the market is set up,” keep an eye on her young son. As he grew older, her column Parker says, “there has to be a left, there has to be a right, there topics sprawled from the confines of the household into the has to be a conservative, there has to be a liberal, there has to be world at large—politics, personalities, world events. And a man, a woman, a black, an Asian. Blah blah blah blah.” despite her current reputation as a conservative, it has always This political packaging came as a surprise to some. About been pretty hard to predict where she will go. “I personally six years ago, Keyes, Parker’s former editor, was managing do not pass judgment on a woman who has made the pain- editor of a paper in Hawaii and searching for a right-leaning ful decision to have an abortion. I figure that’s her business,” columnist to round off the op-ed page. “I called a friend of Parker wrote in a Sept. 6, 1991, column blasting the parents mine who’s an editorial-page editor and said, ‘I’m looking for of young children involved in a graphic Operation Rescue a good conservative columnist,’” Keyes says. “And this person protest. “While some people arguably should not have abor- said, ‘Oh, Kathleen Parker!’ I said, ‘What?’ I thought, ‘Oh, that tions,” she concluded “it is abundantly clear that some people must be another Kathleen Parker.’” should not have children.” But Parker’s focus on traditional gender roles and impa- During the 1991 confirmation hearings for Clarence Thom- tience with political correctness were enough to sell her as a as, she wrote several columns highlighting what she considered conservative in a market where a right-leaning woman was an to be the very real problem of sexual harassment. A Jan. 8, appropriately diversifying oddity. (Which is not to say being 1993, column defended Hillary Clinton against the criticism a woman was an advantage. of men who feel threatened by female intelligence. An Aug. 3, “When my syndicate tried to 1997, column was devoted to making fun of Concerned Women sell me,” Parker recalls, “they for America, a right-wing women’s organization then engaged often heard: ‘We don’t need in a moral crusade against Disney cartoons, in particular The Parker, we have [Ellen] Good- Little Mermaid, under attack for inappropriate dress on an man.’ Meaning, we already animated sea creature. She likes Supreme Court Justice Sonia have a woman.”) Sotomayor, the Republican opposition to whom she para- And it was as a nominal phrased as: “Are you the bitch everyone says you are?” conservative, not as a Palin- One would be hard-pressed under these circumstances to bashing would-be liberal, label Parker a loyal Republican. Indeed, she maintains that she that The Washington Post

(continued from previous page) circulation, so a small news- 35 percent of the total mar- three tiers of news content: paper may pay as little as $5 a ket, and the top 18 columnists some free and supported by week to run a column; a large reached as many readers as ads, some available by sub- paper might pay as much as of the newspaper industry. the other 183. scription, and some available $100, with the rest in between. In 2007, when I was at the While there may be lots on a pay-per-view basis. This The typical syndication con- progressive media watchdog of people who can call them- presents a problem for both tract stipulates that all fees organization Media Matters selves “syndicated colum- the syndicates and the colum- will be split 50-50 between the for America, we surveyed nists,” in other words, the top nists whose words they sell to columnist and the syndicate. every daily newspaper in two dozen or so are the ones papers, because it’s hard to The result is that a columnist America and asked which syn- who dominate. Their competi- get a paper to pay much for a could see his or her columns dicated columnists they ran tion could be reduced further column that runs only on its run in dozens of papers around (96 percent responded, so our by the cuts happening within Web site. And as The New York the country and only net a survey was as close to com- individual newspapers. When Times found out when it made few thousand dollars a year. “I plete as it could be). While the I asked David Sirota, whose its columnists available online would be shocked if there were study identified 201 colum- syndicated column runs in a to subscribers only, there are more than 10 or 20” columnists nists who appeared in three or few large papers like the San only so many people willing to who could make a living just more papers and in more than Francisco Chronicle, Denver pay a monthly fee to read Mau- from their column, says Dave one state, the overall market Post, and Seattle Times, and reen Dowd’s bon mots. Astor, a columnist for The Mont- was extremely concentrated a few dozen smaller papers Not that newspapers pay all clair Times in New Jersey who at the top. Using the combined scattered around the coun- that much for syndicated col- covered the syndicate industry circulation reached by each try, to predict the future of umns as it is. The syndicates for many years at Editor & Pub- columnist, the 10 most widely the op-ed column, he said, use a sliding scale based on lisher, the trade publication read accounted for more than “The first thing you’ll see is

18 november 2009 www.prospect.org hired her—just weeks before she wrote the column advising ing toward an implicit governmental religion that suggests not the vice-presidential nominee to step down. only intolerance but also an un-American exclusivity.” Parker has placed herself, in other words, in the role of this is kathleen parker’s moment. According to The Wash- anti-ideologue, a rhetorical platform that manifests itself ington Post’s Alan Shearer, an average columnist might break not in the deferential moderation of fellow columnist David into 15 new papers a year. In September alone, while the busi- Broder but in a sarcastic, somewhat incoherent iconoclasm. ness of news gathering was supposedly imploding, 58 papers There are the ideologues who think you should get upset when added Parker’s column to their pages. At the Post, the op-ed the Transportation Security Administration singles you out page’s most recent addition also gener- for a strip search and the ideologues ates “as much or more” reader mail as who think you should be jailed for ter- anyone there. “I got one this morning An average columnist minating a pregnancy. There are the that said, ‘You bloody c---. You bitch,’” might break into 15 smut-peddling Hollywood directors, Parker says blithely, drawing a strip of and there are the moralizing popes. chicken from her salad and feeding it new papers a year. This kind of dogmatic anti-dogmatism into her purse. “He’s an appraiser in In September alone, fans out into distrust of any and all Texas. He signed his name. I don’t know “experts,” a word Parker has trouble what column he was upset about.” 58 papers added saying without a sneer, as in “alleged The list of media professionals who Parker to their pages. parenting experts” or “the usual array have profited by replacing one ideology of crisis experts.” Parker is also fond of with another is well known in Wash- the locution, “I’m not an expert, but,” ington. In Parker’s case, however, it’s not clear that she ever the implication being that university-obtained erudition is no adhered to the ideology she is charged with abandoning. Nor is substitute for rock-ribbed American judgment. her hatred of oogedy-boogedyism sign of a new, Bubba-bashing, This concern with the influence of social reformers manifests cocktail party–attending Kathleen Parker. She did not grow itself most deeply in Save the Males, wherein we enter a dark up in a religious household (“occasionally, when we drank too world of experts (and girls) gone wild. “Sex equity experts,” as much, we would become religious”), and she has long evinced a it were, are trying to make boys more like girls. Experts from distaste for the excesses of would-be moralists. “It’s interesting the American Association of University Women are coaxing that the GOP,” she wrote in 1995, “once champion of the found- schools into ignoring boys. Meanwhile, it seems, we’ve all lost ing principle separating church and state, now should be inch- our sense of common decency, which is why “pole-dancing

the death of the local national them to do,” like focusing on authority can be created in a the Internet. Tiny dots of ink on column,” by which he meant a local issues and contributing to number of ways—a history of paper still seem more impor- column about national issues, the papers’ Web sites, are still erudition and wisdom, say, or tant and weighty than tiny pix- written by a local columnist getting the ax. winning a Nobel Prize in eco- els on a screen. As newspapers employed by the paper in your nomics. It can also be a matter dwindle and the Web expands, hand. In a struggling industry, it’s possible that the of style—Fred Barnes famous- space on the printed page the economics of keeping that decline of newspapers will ly said on television, when becomes even more precious person on staff are just too mean the decline of the super- asked if he could speak “with and rare—imbuing the people difficult, when readers can be star columnist, but it may be authority” on an obscure topic, whose words occupy it with all offered the same thing from a more likely that the opposite “I can speak to almost any- the more prestige. syndicated column that may will happen. Despite the near- thing with a lot of authority.” That doesn’t mean that cost the newspaper just a few infinite amount of opinion For the newspaper colum- op-ed columnists in the future hundred dollars a year. available on the Internet, nist, the largest part of that will ignore the Internet the way These columnists are newspaper columnists belong authority comes from the the older generation of colum- already starting to be laid off, to an exclusive club that could simple fact that your words nists does today. (You haven’t but that doesn’t mean that become even more exclusive. are printed on the pages of an read David Broder’s blog, those who focus on local issues That’s because what important publication. “There because he doesn’t have one. are safe from the brutal cuts makes a columnist important is something unique about Not that you’d want to read it if happening in newsrooms all is authority, the perception the power of print” in creating he did.) As Sirota argues (and over the country. As Astor among readers that the per- prestige, says Rick Newcombe Newcombe seconds), when notes, “In some cases, even son who penned this missive of Creators, who admits this Broder’s generation of colum- those who are doing everything is someone whose opinions even as he tries desperately to nists retires, editors will begin

al behrman / ap images their papers say they want are worth listening to. That help newspapers “monetize” asking (continued next page)

the american prospect 19 moms” are everywhere, “faking intimacy with an inanimate illegal, and racial profiling is permitted but not celebrated. pillar that never goes limp,” their “prostitots decked in baby It is, in other words, precisely the world in which we actu- hookerwear” not far behind. This is a world in which “being a ally live. For all her railing against our decadent times, Parker slut isn’t just fashionable … it’s practically mandatory,” and the is a stalwart defender of the status quo, committed to the arbi- “sexual aggressiveness of young women,” terrifying as it is, may trary prejudices of our age—recall her problem with men in be responsible for a “rising incidence of impotence among young jewelry—and skeptical of anyone whose ideology might chal- males.” Such is our gender confusion that “metrosexuals [are] lenge our present state of affairs. She is literally a conservative, everywhere,” “babies now can be custom-ordered without the which means she is nothing of a Republican. And it is only by muss and fuss of human intimacy,” and pretending that we are much, much fur- “in France, men already are fantasizing ther along the road to perdition than we about the day they can give birth.” Parker is a true actually are that Parker can look long- To those of us who wake up every day conservative, ingly back to some lost age of decency. in an America that is not some cross “The great thing about having five between a Ron Jeremy film, Queer skeptical of anyone mothers,” she told me, “was that with Eye for the Straight Guy, and a fresh- whose ideology might each one you get a new religion and new man women’s studies seminar, this décor. Women take everything. When characterization of American culture challenge our present you get a divorce? They take the switch will seem terrifically odd. It is partly state of affairs. plates. So we lived in an empty house because of such characterizations that the last three years in high school. We Parker has been labeled a reactionary. literally had no furniture.” The world Parker actually wants is not a world in which women Parker writes for those who want to keep the furniture in make babies and men chop wood. It is merely a world in which place, the house unstripped. Week after week, she bolts the one can walk down an average city street and not be confronted living-room set to the floor. And at a time when the low rumble by a 4-year-old in a “Future Porn Star” T-shirt, a world in which of a moving truck suggests not hope of change but fear of loss, most women do not own stripper poles, a world in which most she is more popular than ever. tap people do not know that sex-equity experts even exist. It’s a world in which most people don’t say “vagina” in polite conver- Kerry Howley is an arts fellow at the University of Iowa’s sation, vice presidents are expected to know something about literary nonfiction writing program and a contributing edi- the country that elected them, abortion is stigmatized but not tor at Reason magazine.

(continued from previous page) (after Ellen Goodman). If you enhance their prestige. was Pitts. Cal Thomas, despite a different set of questions don’t know him, it’s because So it wasn’t surprising that his presence in hundreds of about the columnists with his column, which originates when National Journal pub- papers, was mentioned by only whom they choose to replace with The , doesn’t lished a survey in September of one of the 375. them. Does this writer have run in the major D.C. or New 375 “political insiders,” asking But as long as there exists a a large online following? Will York papers, and he almost which commentators “most thing called a “newspaper”— she drive traffic to my Web never appears on television. help to shape their own opin- even if many of the 1,400 daily site? “The newspaper indus- And while bloggers are now ions or worldview,” the first papers currently operating try can no longer rely on the showing up on cable chat seven places were taken by in the United States go out of newspaper alone to get read- shows, the most important columnists for the Times and business—people will contin- ers,” Sirota says. seats on the primetime and the Post. The top spot was held ue to believe that the opinions Nonetheless, it is still true Sunday shows (along with by , perhaps of those whose words rub off that maximal authority—and other high-profile venues like a testament to the D.C. estab- on our fingers are somehow a influence—is created by a National Public Radio’s All lishment’s fascination with little more valid and important combination of print and tele- Things Considered) are largely all-encompassing yet over- than opinions we find only on vision. Consider this: Do you reserved for the top-tier simplified metaphors (or the the Web. tap know who Jr. newspaper columnists, par- wisdom of Bangalore cab driv- is? If you live in D.C. or New ticularly those published in ers). Just as interesting were Paul Waldman is a Prospect York, you probably don’t. Yet The New York Times and The those who didn’t make the cut: senior correspondent and the Pitts, a winner Washington Post. The pres- Goodman, the most widely author of Being Right is Not for commentary, is the second tige of the papers that pub- read progressive columnist Enough: What Progressives most widely syndicated pro- lish their columns gets them in the country, was not men- Must Learn From Conserva- gressive columnist in America those gigs, which further tioned by a single “insider,” nor tive Success.

20 november 2009 www.prospect.org