To the shock of no one who has been paying any attention, Bill Kristol is a NYT columnist no longer.
And while some will say that it was because of his ideology, I say nay: it was because he columns weren’t any good (note some recent ruminations by me on the subject here). Indeed, Kristol’s ideology is what got him hired, but in reading his stuff I can say with certainty it was simply not very well written.
As Scott Horton of the Daily Beast notes:
The problems that emerged were more fundamental. Kristol’s writing wasn’t compelling or even very careful. He either lacked a talent for solid opinion journalism or wasn’t putting his heart into it. A give-away came in the form of four corrections the newspaper was forced to run over factual mistakes in the columns, creating an impression that they were rushed out without due diligence or attention to factual claims. A senior writer at Time magazine recounted to me a similar experience with Kristol following his stint in 2024-07. “His conservative ideas were cutting edge and influential,” I was told. “But his sloppy writing and failure to fact check what he wrote made us queasy.”
That all sounds about right. Somehow, however, I think he will get by without a government bailout.
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January 26th, 2024 at 11:26 pm
I don’t know, I have canceled by subscription to The Weekly Standard.
January 27th, 2024 at 8:53 am
[...] Kristol’s last column,” it was unremarkable. Which, most observers on the Left and Right seem to agree, was something it had in common with most of Kristol’s NYT columns and largely [...]
January 27th, 2024 at 8:53 am
[...] Kristol’s last column,” it was unremarkable. Which, most observers on the Left and Right seem to agree, was something it had in common with most of Kristol’s NYT columns and largely [...]