Breaking News: Opinion Page Stilted, Old-Fashioned

I’ll admit it: I had a long, blank moment. The New York Observer reported this week on “how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at the New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of the New York Times,” and I couldn’t bring the opinion pages of the New York Times into my head: Maureen, uh, Dowd, does she still work there? So I went and looked, and Lord Jesus help me, I’d forgotten that Gail Collins and Frank Bruni exist. I actually forgot to check if Maureen Dowd still works there, but if she does, have her pop culture references made it into the current century yet? Like what Ross did on that one episode of Friends, I very much doubt that they have.

The most curious fact about newspapers is that they get duller as they die. There’s no inevitability to the awful sameness of contemporary print media; the opinion pages of different newspapers could, in fact, have an enjoyably different look and feel to them. Newspaper columnists could be, and have been, rude, funny, uncomfortably perceptive, inclined to moral crusades and inclined to dismiss moral crusades. Or they could be Thomas Friedman.

The nature of the business relationships illuminate the quality of the product. “The difficulty,” the Observer offers, “comes in part from the way the Times is structured. Andrew Rosenthal reports not to Executive Editor Jill Abramson but directly to publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. One source claims that Mr. Sulzberger is ‘afraid’ of Mr. Rosenthal, possibly because of a perceived debt that the Sulzberger family owes to Mr. Rosenthal’s father, A. M. ‘Abe’ Rosenthal, for the elder Mr. Rosenthal’s half century of service to the Sulzberger family.”

What a perfect way to boil tapioca. Dynasties kill flavor. A page edited by a son because dad was kind of a big deal is a page edited with an eye to status and credentials. Hey, Friedman must be good—he won some Pulitzers. That’s a prize, you see, that Pulitzer thing. Big, big prize. We put it up on the wall. (Pause) Anyway, ready for a cocktail?

While the Times uses new media to create interesting ways of telling a story—in search of new audiences to tell them to, and I wish them the best of luck—its opinion pages look precisely like the opinion pages of twenty or forty years ago: column right, column left, high-Broderist on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and here’s a guest bit from a politician or a professor to fill the lower-middle box of text. The post-disintermediated world is aflood with opinion, and some of it is worth reading. Some of it has a voice and a position, even an occasionally surprising position. When was the last time you were surprised by something in the opinion pages of the New York Times, leaving aside the moments you were surprised by how awful something was?

Someone should start over. Like, yesterday. Someone whose dad didn’t work for the same newspaper.