Opinion Pages Thrive on Diversity

Ruin a Breakfast

  After ten years as Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street journal, ready for a change, my publisher and close friend, Peter Kann, suggested a package including a column. He arranged a lunch with Bob Bartley the editorial page editor.

  Bob was a very smart, hard core conservative. Many of my views likely would be different. This was in 1993, before Fox News or any of the plethora of right wing media sites. Bob explained readers of the Journal's editorial page were passionately loyal, viewing it as an oasis in a desert of left wing journalism.

"I want you to ruin their breakfasts Thursday mornings," he said in offering me a column.

I noted on a few issues like trade, I agreed with the editorial page. "If we want somebody to write about trade," he replied, "we can do better than you. " I didn't disagree.

For more than eleven years I wrote a column for that great newspaper that no doubt soured a lot of eggs.. Some good editors, all conservatives, would fix dangling participles or occasionally insert a missing subject or predicate. But never was an ideological issues raised.

  Bob, who passed away more than twenty years ago understood something that eludes Jeff Bezos, who has banned certain opinions from the Washington Post which he owns: an opinion section is much better if he has some diversity.

  The Wall Street Journal editorial page under Bartley, and his successor Paul Gigot is the North Star of traditional conservatism on taxes, spending, trade, national security and social issues. It never can be accused of both side-isms, not the print equivalent of the PBS' News Hour. But always there has been a minority of diversity, call us tokens, but it is there.

That's true of interesting editorial pages. At the "liberal" New York Times, some of the most interesting columns --after Maureen Dowd --are conservatives, David Brooks, David French and Bret Stephens, who I disagree with more than 80% of the time but find interesting and thought provoking most of the time.

Bezos declared that on two issues, personal liberties and free markets, the Post will not permit opposing views. These are ill-defined but the intent was clear enough that after conversations with Bezos, the editorial page editor, David Shipley, resigned.

I strongly suspect the Amazon CEO is using the Post to pander to Trump. He sat with the Trump contingent during the inaugural and Amazon forked out $40 million to fund a vanity documentary on Melania Trump. Marty Baron, the former editor of the Post, believes Bezos is "fearful of reprisals" from Trump.

Another rich owner trying to please the President is Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times. He has criticized his own paper's coverage as anti-conservative, He is attaching a bias meter" on columns. It's not only a stupid notion, but aren't columns supposed to be opinionated ? That's what Bob Bartley told me.

At the Washington Post I'm even more worried about the Bezos-inspired drain of talented editors and reporters on the more important news side. They've left convinced the Post has lost its mission. This is the paper of Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, Woodward-Bernstein, courageous, fearless, holding the powerful accountable. Never has that been more important; it's a blow to Democracy if the Post abdicates that role.

Closing on my earlier days as a contrarian columnist for the Wall Street Journal, doubt I made many converts but several good friends. These include frequent exchanges, critiquing my column's shortcomings, from from two Texas Republicans, Susan Hoffman and Andrew McKinney. I think Trump has cured them.

The most response I ever got was not about taxes, or impeachment or war or even the controversial 200 Presidential election. It was a piece about our family and death of out Golden retriever. "I've always thought you were a no good com-sump," one of the pages loyal readers wrote. "but any man that loves a dog can't be all bad."