Pundit Boxscore for Monday 28 July 2003

DAVID BROOKS TO NYT: On Friday, The New York Times announced that David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard would become a regular columnist beginning in September. The news makes this paragraph from a recent Brooks column a little ironic:

Wherever Democrats look, they sense their powerlessness. Even when they look to the media, they feel that conservatives have the upper hand. Conservatives think this is ludicrous. We may have Rush and Fox, conservatives say, but you have ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times. But liberals are sincere. They despair that a consortium of conservative think tanks, talk radio hosts, and Fox News--Hillary's vast right-wing conspiracy--has cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out.

Coming conveniently after a recent debate between Hoystory and Tapped over whether columnists for the Times or The Wall Street Journal is more one-sided ideologically, the addition of a second conservative columnist would seem to settle the question in favor of Tapped and the Times.

The position of Lying in Ponds is that newspapers are free to be ideologically unbalanced in their choice of columnists, but that newspapers which seek to serve a broad audience should offer their readers a range of intelligent commentary. The New York Times has taken an important step in that direction; when will The Wall Street Journal expand the very narrow ideological range of their columnists? Robert Bartley of the Journal seems to imply that it won't happen soon.