Salon.com > Salon Hack List 2011 http://www.salon.com Wed, 30 May 2012 06:12:34 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Hack List Alums: Where Are They Now? http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/hack_list_alums_where_are_they_now/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/hack_list_alums_where_are_they_now/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:20:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10318731 You can think of these guys as retired from the Hack List (like a Hall of Fame) or as simply to dull to rip into at length for a second time, but these 2010 Hack List veterans did not actually improve their game in 2011.

Pat Caddell (Last year: Number 27.)

The fake Democratic pollster is repeating himself, and somehow it just gets dumber every time.

Jonah Goldberg (Last year: Number 7.)

In March Jonah Goldberg literally wrote "meh" instead of rebutting an argument, in his nationally syndicated political column.

Thomas Friedman (Last year: Number 3.)

Thomas Friedman continued to, domestically, demand a centrist third party that acted exactly like our current centrist Democratic party. But his best work, as always, concerned foreign lands. What other columnist would have the balls to go to the scene of a popular revolution and "quote" a native pleading with the wise American columnist to explain what he thinks is going on in her country?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/hack_list_alums_where_are_they_now/feed/ 16 1. Mark Halperin http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/1_mark_halperin/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/1_mark_halperin/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10435641 What more is there to say about Mark Halperin? He certainly hasn't gotten any better since last year, when a panel of experts (me) named him the world's second biggest hack. He's still wrong about everything. He's still shallow and predictable. He's still both fixated solely on the horse race and also uniquely bad at analyzing the horse race.

Halperin spent 2011 gearing up for the presidential elections by parroting transparently lame spin from Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, insisting that Palin was really going to run for president and taking Trump's farcical vanity "campaign" seriously as anything other than a time-wasting stunt. He still takes Mark Penn seriously as a wise campaign sage and not an amoral grifter. And he got in trouble for calling President Obama a "dick" on "Morning Joe," because the president criticized the GOP at a press conference. (This after Halperin spends years writing columns calling him a weak-willed wimp, because he is a Democrat.) The worst thing was not that he called the president a dick, it was that the president hadn't even been dickish. (Well, the worst thing was the whole "Morning Joe" team giggling like stoned teenagers that Halperin said a bad word.) Halperin is so dedicated to being wrong about everything that, upon his return to the airwaves, he actually made a point of mentioning that, had he been on TV during his suspension, he would've been wrong about something. Plus he did a "Morning Joe" appearance from an airplane bathroom which is surely illegal.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/1_mark_halperin/feed/ 35 2. Jennifer Rubin http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/2_jennifer_rubin/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/2_jennifer_rubin/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10349801 The Washington Post had a big problem. It failed, twice, at hiring a proper "Conservative blogger," a commodity every newspaper website needs. Its first hire was a plagiarist, and then it accidentally hired a reporter who wasn't conservative enough. The third time, it got someone directly from the neocon Weekly Standard Commentary, ensuring her bona fides. The only problem with Jennifer Rubin as a "conservative blogger," though, is that while she's most definitely a Republican, she doesn't seem invested in any conservative issues, bar foreign policy. And by foreign policy, I mean a fanatical hatred of Arabs and Muslims accompanied by constant fear-mongering about the jihadist menace and regular accusations of anti-Semitism (and tacit support for terrorism) levied against anyone slightly critical of Israeli government policies or remotely sympathetic to Palestinians.

So, good work, Washington Post editors, you have finally provided some "balance" for your newspaper's many left-wing Palestinian voices, like ... Mary Worth?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/2_jennifer_rubin/feed/ 18 3. Bernard-Henri Levy http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/3_bernard_henri_levy/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/3_bernard_henri_levy/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10435581 One upside to America's frothing populist hatred of intellectuals is that we don't produce many Bernard-Henri Lévys. Unfortunately, we tend to take other nations' tedious, fame-seeking big thinkers far too seriously. I think our magazine editors are seduced by accents -- it's the only explanation for why they keep trying to sell us "BHL" and Niall Ferguson.

So BHL, the famous and wealthy French philosopher, gets assigned to travel across America for the Atlantic, and produces the laundry list of clichés you'd expect: We're all fat and religious and we worship the flag and baseball.

BHL the intrepid reporter writes a book on the killing of Daniel Pearl, and it's rife with errors and prejudice.

He's prospered in intellectual circles despite his tragic inability to button a shirt in part because he's a successful businessman, born into wealth and friends with the French corporate elite. He writes with the self-assuredness of someone quite convinced of his brilliance, and that self-assurance perhaps explains why he so regularly makes shit up and gets shit wrong.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/3_bernard_henri_levy/feed/ 17 4. Erin Burnett http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/4_erin_burnett/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/4_erin_burnett/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:01:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10350311 Erin Burnett was a perfect fit at CNBC, a business news network that interprets its mission as reporting for business leaders and the finance industry and not on them. A former Goldman Sachs analyst who also did a stint at Citigroup (business journalism might be worse than political reporting when it comes to team-switching and fraternizing among "sources" and "journalists"), Burnett epitomizes the CNBC worldview, where the ideal business journalist is a levelheaded interpreter of the omniscient market and ally of the wise men who've been enriched by it. Making the switch to being a news program host for us regular folk, on CNN, has not been without a couple of hitches for Ms. Burnett. Turns out, regular people don't naturally perceive CEOs and bankers as heroic figures, especially in the midst of a mass employment and consumer debt crisis that the wealthy have escaped unscathed.

Burnett, despite her youth, is a relic of a bygone age. She embodies '90s "market populism," to use Thomas Frank's phrase, now still surviving on our airwaves as a zombie idea. The idea of America as a mass "shareholder society" is a sick joke in a nation currently sharply divided between struggling debtors and bailed-out creditors, but the dream is popular enough among the well-off professionals in charge of our news networks that CNN pinned its prime-time hopes on Burnett appealing to a mass audience. (If ratings are any indication, it’s not working.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/4_erin_burnett/feed/ 36 5. Katie Roiphe http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/5_katie_roiphe/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/5_katie_roiphe/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10425461 Katie Roiphe discovered long ago that the secret to perpetual employment in the world of ideas is to be a vocal dissenter from the perceived stogy liberalism of your non-white male demographic group. Thus, the success of the Black Republican Pundit and the anti-feminist woman author. No editor ever got fired for printing a "provocative" piece in which a woman -- a woman! -- trashes feminists.

Twenty years ago, Roiphe got glowing reviews for writing a "courageous" book blaming women for getting raped and attacking feminists for being too zealous in attempting to stop women from getting raped. And arguing that most rape is made up. And saying that women should just understand that men are going to have sex with them against their will if they're foolish enough to imbibe alcohol. And dismissing statistics about the extent of sexual violence with the academically rigorous method of thinking she'd surely have heard about it if a bunch of her friends had been raped. It was dumb, but it was the '90s, and that kinda shit sold. (Camille Paglia loved it!)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/5_katie_roiphe/feed/ 41 6. Erick Erickson http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/6_erick_erickson/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/6_erick_erickson/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10431391 Erick Erickson is a generic right-wing blogger whose only notable quality as a commentator is his cowardly unwillingness to stand behind the various vitriolic things he says and writes. He's not a good writer or interesting thinker or particularly funny or savvy. His idea of a good gag is calling David Souter a "goat-fucking child molester" and then deleting that tweet and then hastily rewriting it when he got called on it and then crying to Howard Kurtz that he regretted ever writing it.

Even the many vile and stupid things he says are repetitive and predictable. He's called Barack Obama a Nazi on multiple occasions, for crimes like "criticizing the insurance industry" and "wanting to host the Olympics." Who can forget the time he idly wondered when citizens would "march down to their state legislator's house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp" over a Washington state proposal to regulate phosphates in dishwasher detergent? That's quality political analysis right there! No wonder CNN hired him!

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/6_erick_erickson/feed/ 12 7. Robert Samuelson http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/7_robert_samuelson/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/7_robert_samuelson/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10369201 Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson is an exercise in how often and for how long one can continue repeating the exact same received conservative economic dogma when observable reality contradicts each of your arguments before people begin to stop taking you seriously. (The answer is "always and forever.")

So. In Samuelson's telling, the European debt crisis was caused by the welfare state. But internationally, there's no real correlation between government debt burdens and government spending on social programs. (Like, for example, Germany is doing better than Greece, which has a smaller welfare state.)

According to Samuelson, the American federal government debt will (any minute now!!!!) lead to hyperinflation. This was in November of 2009. We're all still waiting.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/7_robert_samuelson/feed/ 9 8. Piers Morgan http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/8_piers_morgan/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/8_piers_morgan/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10349981 Let’s be honest: Larry King wasn’t much of a journalist. He was a lovable character, but he managed to get the big interviews because he lobbed softballs. But as I said, at least he was lovable. I’m not sure anyone besides a toxic celebrity’s public relations team could love Mr. Morgan, who alternates between fawning sycophancy and obvious contempt. Nothing about the man seems remotely sincere besides his self-regard.

And it’s odd that he even still has a career in what we’ll charitably refer to as journalism. As a talent show judge, a history of awful editorial decisions doesn’t much matter. But I’d argue that a news interview show host ought not to have been fired from the tabloid newspaper he ran for being credulous and sloppy enough to put a massive hoax on the front page, as Morgan famously did at the Daily Mirror.

Then there’s the fact that one former Mirror reporter has said phone-hacking was an “accepted technique” at Morgan’s paper, and Morgan has written of listening to a celebrity’s voice-mail message that was most likely obtained through the practice that’s landed other British tabloids in serious legal trouble. Morgan has issued a series of increasingly carefully worded denials.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/8_piers_morgan/feed/ 12 9. Mike Allen http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/9_mike_allen/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/9_mike_allen/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10367471 Politico is everything that's wrong with political reporting and Mike Allen is its mascot. He's not the worst person there, and he's not solely responsible for the toxic culture of that depressing repository of intentionally trivial minutiae, masturbatory speculation pretending to be analysis, and über-cynical play-by-play reports on "spin" and "messaging" (that would be Jim VandeHei, who is responsible for those things), but he is its superstar.

Allen, a weird guy who refuses to, say, name his hobbies on the record to a man writing a friendly profile of him, writes what is basically a morning email newsletter full of links to various political stories, and this newsletter basically "sets the agenda" for the people who decide what constitutes important political news at the cable news channels. It is seriously 90 percent capsule summaries of day-old news articles, and what original Allen-added content there is is usually pretty banal. (When it's not aggravatingly stupid.) Sometimes he just randomly makes things up, for fun, and then those things become major national news stories for like a day, which is certainly good for Politico's traffic.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/9_mike_allen/feed/ 2 10. Naomi Wolf http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/10_naomi_wolf/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/10_naomi_wolf/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10364941 In 2004, Naomi Wolf wrote a powerful story for New York magazine about being sexually harassed by a powerful and widely respected man, and failing to come forward for years because coming forward with a harassment claim is often more damaging for the accuser than for the accused.

In 2010 she participated in the widespread questioning of the secret ties and motives of the women who accused Julian Assange of sexual assault and rape. In a sarcastic open letter to Interpol, Wolf seriously downplayed the severity of the claims levied against Assange, in order to argue that he's the victim of a political conspiracy.

Here's Wolf's version of events:

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims' complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women's apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, 'reading stories about himself online' in the cab. Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That's what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/10_naomi_wolf/feed/ 81 11. Bill Keller http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/11_bill_keller/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/11_bill_keller/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10362881 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.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/11_bill_keller/feed/ 8 12. David Brooks http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/12_david_brooks/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/12_david_brooks/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10362961 Last year, we gave New York Times columnist and liberal editors' favorite moderate conservative David Brooks grief for being milquetoast and lazy. But this year, let's hand it to the guy: When you want a truly vile opinion dressed up to sound innocuous, Brooks is your guy.

He can make a defense of racist demagoguing sound benign. He obfuscates and misleads on income inequality, while, as always, accusing those damned coastal liberal elites of disrespecting Real Americans. Accusing liberals of disrespecting Real Americans is one of Brooks' go-to lines, even though there's absolutely no evidence that he has any clue whatsoever how the middle and working classes live in America in 2011.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/12_david_brooks/feed/ 33 13. Megyn Kelly http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/13_megyn_kelly/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/13_megyn_kelly/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10354291 Megyn Kelly is one of Fox News chief Roger Ailes' favorites, and it's easy to see why: She's equal parts gorgeous and belligerent. She's smart and quick enough to hold her own in any interview, and she has no qualms about beating the drum for whatever crackpot right-wing story line the network's lead propagandists are currently pushing, no matter how dubious. Hence, we get a year's worth of terrifying stories on the awesome political power of the New Black Panther Party, complete with unlikely Justice Department conspiracy theories and b-roll footage designed to unnerve old white viewers. When the story has outlived its usefulness, it's summarily forgotten, and we move on to the next tale.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/13_megyn_kelly/feed/ 24 14. Joe Scarborough http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/14_joe_scarborough/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/14_joe_scarborough/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10325771 Nothing sums up everything hatable about cable news and politics and possibly America itself better than "Morning Joe," MSNBC's daily extended advertisement for Starbucks products and Joe Scarborough's odd belief that he is funny and charming.

The former Florida congressman and possibly attorney of some kind followed up his unremarkable political career by becoming a wildly successful moderate TV talker. ("Wildly successful" in terms of monetary compensation and publicity -- his show is watched by less than half the number of people who watch Fox's daily televised morning train wreck "Fox & Friends.") Joe's supposed to be some sort of maverick because he's not a doctrinaire Republican (anymore), but what he is is a totally doctrinaire member of the moderate Beltway political establishment.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/14_joe_scarborough/feed/ 29 15. Wolf Blitzer http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/15_wolf_blitzer/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/15_wolf_blitzer/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10320351 Wolf Blitzer might be the single dumbest person on television. You can tell, listening to his verbal diarrhea-style of breaking news narration, that he's paid to fill airtime with talk, not communicate ideas. The confirmation for me was his epically awful appearance on "Celebrity Jeopardy," in which he didn't just lose, he lost spectacularly. And "Celebrity Jeopardy" is not hard. And he kept buzzing in, even when he clearly had no clue. And the "Tonight Show" aired clips of Wolf being just as awful in rehearsal.

Not that a newsreader needs to be brilliant, or even to have a decent grasp of general information. But Blitzer's dimness is all-too-evident on "The Situation Room," CNN's seemingly 16-hour-long daytime showcase for its biggest video screen, which is gamely stood in front of by a gibbering goateed moron.

Jack Shafer demonstrated how once Wolf gets a cliché stuck in his head, he can't stop repeating it, like a baby learning English.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/15_wolf_blitzer/feed/ 19 16. Andrea Peyser http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/16_andrea_peyser/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/16_andrea_peyser/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10319141 If you haven't spent much time reading the papers in New York City, you may not be familiar with Andrea Peyser. But you may have noticed the woman in the first row of Anthony Weiner's carnivalesque meltdown of a June press conference announcing his online flirtations who spent an inordinate amount of time shouting uncomfortable questions to the soon-to-be-former congressman about the whereabouts of his wife. That's Peyser. She needed the material so that she could finish her 10th column about how Weiner is history's second greatest monster, next to Eliot Spitzer.

Peyser is the New York Post's resident joyless puritanical scold with a particularly Murdochian obsession with sex. Week in and week out, her column -- which has expanded to become an entire page in the physical paper -- details precisely which women are hookers, sluts, gold diggers and tramps (hint: most women, besides some wronged wives) and which men are whore-mongers and perverts (every Democratic politician alive).

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/16_andrea_peyser/feed/ 6 17. John Stossel http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/17_john_stossel/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/17_john_stossel/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10319101 I'd say it's nice to have a libertarian presence on television regularly, but there are I believe more libertarians on television regularly in 2011 than there are morally ambiguous antiheroes on premium cable dramas. (What we really need are more socialists -- Americans are sick of capitalism!) And Stossel is not a great brand ambassador for the "free minds, free markets" crowd, because he's a silly clown.

Stossel's a ridiculous local-news "consumer watchdog" reporter who discovered Milton Friedman. He's the worst of simple-minded sensationalist television news masquerading as a maverick because he's "politically incorrect" (a term that when self-applied invariably means "an asshole").

If I were a libertarian, I'd be embarrassed by Stossel's prominence. Sneering contempt for supposed liberal shibboleths is not actually a well-considered political philosophy. There's nothing "libertarian," for example, about not believing in climate change. That's just tribal corporatism, totally disconnected from any economics-based belief about the superiority of market forces over government industrial policy.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/17_john_stossel/feed/ 35 18. Jon Meacham http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/18_jon_meacham/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/18_jon_meacham/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10319081 Charles Pierce tackled Meacham earlier this month, asking if the failed Newsweek editor is "the most insufferable human in Washington." I'd say he very well could be, except for when he's in New York lunching at Michael's with Roger Ailes.

Meacham, a famous public intellectual (with the six honorary degrees and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Andrew Jackson that go along with that title), undertook a mission to save print journalism by redesigning Newsweek and telling everyone it was going to be more like The Economist, which meant "for smart people," and after losing $500,000 a week for a few years while not attracting tens of thousands of new, smart readers, the Kaplan Washington Post Co. finally gave up on owning Newsweek altogether, leaving Meacham out of work, which does give him a lot more time to appear on "Morning Joe."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/18_jon_meacham/feed/ 11 19. Ruth Marcus http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/19_ruth_marcus/ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/15/19_ruth_marcus/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:01:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=10316612 Longtime Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus is, like most longtime Washington Post columnists, an eminently predictable fount of polite elite Beltway-area opinion. She's generally a good moderate liberal. She dreams of bipartisan compromises, and lavishes praise on politicians willing to reject party "orthodoxy" in order to come to very orthodox centrist positions. She cares very much about tackling our long-term federal debt. She thinks Republicans are too extreme. She liked Mitch Daniels, except for the antiabortion stuff. She agrees with Robert Gibbs that liberals are "deranged" to criticize Obama, who, after all, has done the best he can, a few wasted opportunities, betrayals and inexplicable tactical missteps aside.

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