Salon.com > Frank Rich

Frank Rich skewers David Gregory: Move him to “Today” show

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 20:32:00 +0000

Longtime New York Times columnist and current New York magazine editor Frank Rich today lambasted "Meet the Press" host David Gregory for challenging Glenn Greenwald's integrity as a journalist and a citizen.

On Sunday, Gregory asked Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who published Edward Snowden's NSA leak, "Why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" New York magazine points out that Gregory's question "all but accused the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald of aiding and abetting Edward Snowden's fugitive travels."

But Rich rebuts: "Is David Gregory a journalist?"

"As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he’s covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he’s conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin or Chuck Schumer."

"Presumably if Gregory had been around 40 years ago," Rich adds snidely, "he also would have accused the Times of aiding and abetting the enemy when it published Daniel Ellsberg’s massive leak of the Pentagon Papers."

Frank Rich: Right will rage if Obama wins

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater, many liberals have assumed -- or naively hoped -- that each national defeat would teach Republicans that they had overreached, and pull them back from the extremes. Instead, the opposite has happened: The lesson of every loss, even the routs, has been "we were not conservative enough."

The Goldwater smackdown in 1964 really did lay the groundwork for the Reagan revolution and the ensuing conservative era. But the loss to Barack Obama in 2008 -- and the toppling of establishment conservatives by tea party insurgents in 2010 -- has put the extremes in charge. Even someone as conservative and virulently opposed to the Obama agenda as Mitch McConnell has hired a tea party veteran -- and Rand Paul adviser -- to run his 2014 Senate re-election campaign.

So what happens if Obama beats Mitt Romney and the Republicans again, this time after the likes of McConnell made denying him a second term their main legislative mission over the last four years? The earnest-minded might hope that Republicans view Obama's re-election as a message to cooperate and a sign that their obstruction failed. The sober-minded might look at the number of ridiculous white men determined to make rape victims carry their attacker's baby and a primary campaign filled with evolution opponents and assume common sense and basic decency, or at least post-Renaissance thinking, might return on social and cultural issues.

PBS takes a bullet

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:50:00 +0000

One of the more schizophrenic outcomes of last night’s Obama-Romney debate, and the insta-panic Obama’s poor performance has fomented among liberals, has to do with PBS. The morning after, the Public Broadcasting System finds itself both scapegoat and call to arms, with liberals simultaneously dissing moderator Jim Lehrer and embracing the ever-adorable Big Bird.

On MSNBC last night, after the debate had wrapped, Rachel Maddow refrained from naming a “winner” (her colleagues would not be so polite — or is it partisan?) but did say she thought Jim Lehrer, elder (and elderly) statesman of PBS, had officially put the nail in the coffin of this particular debate format. By near universal assessment, Lehrer did a bad job, but Maddow was spinning, taking the focus off Obama and putting it on Lehrer with a bit of blame-shifting. As Frank Rich wrote on Twitter last night, “Lehrer can't be blamed for Obama's failings. His own were dreadful enough.” But Lehrer is still shouldering some of the criticism for a less-than-stellar-for-the-Democrats debate.