When the New York Times recently announced that they had hired William Kristol as their new Op-Ed columnist, they came in for some criticism from the left: Why was the Times kowtowing to the right by hiring the editor of the right-wing Weekly Standard?
On the surface, the answer was simple. In the old days, they had William Safire, Vice President Agnew's ex-speech writer, as the house conservative, and now that Safire had retired, to restore the balance between left and right they had simply replaced one conservative with another.
In fact, however, as founders of the Institute of Expertology, and authors of its recent study, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! or HOW WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ: The Experts Speak, we can assure you that balance between left and right had nothing to do with it.
On February 24, 2003, William Kristol said ""[D]emocratizing the country should not be too tall an order for the world's sole superpower." The point is not that he was conservative, but rather that he, like the rest of the so-called experts, was wrong.
Then on Sunday, the Times asked a group of "experts" to comment on the fifth anniversary of President Bush's declaration of "the end of major combat operations." And wouldn't you know, half of them had also gotten it wrong! For example, L. Paul Bremer III, who disbanded the entire Iraqi military, explaining "We don't need them." Or Richard Perle, who said on September 22, 2003, "A year from now I'll be very surprised if there is not a grand square in Baghdad named after President Bush."
Clearly, then, the New York Times, along with the rest of the mainstream media, was indeed doing its best to be fair and "balanced". But not balanced between right and left. Rather, the Times has apparently decided that to be fair to its readers, it has to be balanced between right and wrong.
Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky are the authors of MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! or HOW WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ: The Experts Speak
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Posted May 8, 2008 | 04:38 PM (EST)