Bashing NYT Columnists, Then and Now
Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan ranks the NYT columnists from best to worst today, and guess who made the bottom of the list?
Thomas Friedman is still the absolute worst. The strangest thing about Tom Friedman’s longevity is the fact that he only has one single column, which he writes over and over in slightly different permutations, like Taco Bell rearranging its six ingredients in different ways and calling them new things. Do think that if we peered into his latest column, this would hold true? Let’s see… would it contain a logically nonsensical sentence followed by the coining of a nonsensical new McPhrase? “Think of how many jobs – makeup artist, receptionist, camera person, producer-director – have been collapsed into one. I raise this point because there is no doubt that the main reason for our 9.1 percent unemployment rate is the steep drop in aggregate demand in the Great Recession. But it is not the only reason. “The Great Recession” is also coinciding with – and driving – ‘The Great Inflection.’” Okay, but would it also contain a seemingly random list of internet-related terms, offered as a catch-all explanation for any phenomenon that Tom Friedman does not fully understand? “I wrote about the connected world in 2004, arguing that the world had gotten “flat.” When I made that argument, though, Facebook barely existed – and Twitter, cloud computing, iPhones, LinkedIn, iPads, the “applications” industry and Skype had either not been invented or were in their infancy. Now they are exploding, taking us from connected to hyperconnected. It is a huge inflection point masked by the Great Recession.” Never change, Tom Friedman. (You won’t).
Bashing Friedman’s prose is practically a rite of passage at this point, of course, with able examples here, here, and here.
As a snarky undergraduate, I also attempted to take down Friedman and the other then-active Times columnists, including the late William Safire. I’m a little embarrassed to be posting the link, because it’s not like my own prose was so wonderful either. And man, was I wrong about Paul Krugman and the recession. What can I say? It was 2004 and I was 20. Still, I like to think I got in a few good digs.
