Salon.com > Bill Keller

What country does the Tea Party represent?

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:26:00 +0000

With an assist from some long-term demographic trends, House Republicans have redistricted, propagandized and policed themselves into another country.

As a result, they have become unmoored from the political incentives that typically drive law-makers' decision-making process. Public opinion no longer sways them, and that is creating a potentially insurmountable problem for the party establishment's efforts to broaden the GOP's appeal beyond angry old white people.

House Republicans may care about the GOP's national fortunes in the abstract, but too many are impervious to what the public at large wants because of the nature of the districts they represent. At the same time, a steady stream of spin from the conservative media provides insulation from the realities of American politics, and deep-pocketed outside groups punish Republicans for any deviation from right-wing orthodoxy.

Bill Keller joins Krugman/Brooks Op-Ed fight

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Like a rich WASP family, the New York Times does not, as a rule, air its disagreements in public. The newspaper of record has a (supposedly unwritten) rule barring opinion columnists from criticizing one another by name. It would be unseemly. So you will never see columnist Paul Krugman specifically criticize something written by columnist David Brooks.

But what you will see, regularly, is Paul Krugman criticizing unnamed people who happen to have made the exact same argument as David Brooks. (Or Thomas Friedman.)

Last week, Krugman wrote a column attacking so-called "centrists" who defend the Paul Ryan budget plan and criticize the president for being too "partisan" about it. The column came a few days after Mr. Brooks defended the Paul Ryan budget plan and criticized the president for being too "partisan" about it.

Bill Keller writes newest, dumbest Biden-Clinton 2012 swap piece

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:59:00 +0000

Bill Keller, a bad opinion columnist, has written a bad opinion column. It is about how Barack Obama will replace Vice President Joe Biden on the 2012 ticket with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a thing that will not actually happen.

The former New York Times editor has lately been celebrating his return to writing by fearlessly tackling hacky column ideas already exhausted by everyone who was writing bad opinion columns during Keller's tenure as a person with an actually important job. Having offered his own takes on classics like "The Huffington Post isn't as good as a real newspaper" and "Twitter is dumb," Keller today tries the old "running mate switcharoo" scenario.

11. Bill Keller

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:30:00 +0000

I guess we should all be grateful for the lesson that you don't need to be all that insightful or wise to become a successful newspaper editor. Bill Keller, once a fine and decorated foreign correspondent, took over the editorship of the New York Times in 2003, when his predecessor, Howell Raines, was forced to resign in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. Keller did, honestly, a decent job righting the ship. It took him a while to deal with the paper's in-hindsight much greater violation of the public trust -- the faulty Iraq reporting of Judith Miller and her bizarre behavior during the Plame fiasco -- but he cut ties with the prevaricating Miller and took responsibility in public and in the paper for errors and mistakes that had really happened under his predecessor. The Times, for its many faults, remains the best newspaper in the nation. (It has retained that title thanks in large part to the tireless work of competing newspaper owners Sam Zell, Rupert Murdoch, the Washington Post Co., but it's still an achievement.)

So it probably would've been best for Keller to have retired to, say, write an unread memoir and join the Council on Foreign Relations instead of deciding to return to the place where his obvious, obnoxious hackishness is most apparent: The opinion page.