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Door Slam: Kicking Michael Kinsley GoodBye
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Like the returning ravens who signal the end of Russian winter, familiar but long-absent bylines recently returned to the LA Times section Formerly Known as Opinion. There was that of former LA Councilman Mike Woo, who hadn’t had a piece therein at least a year. And there was Joe Hicks, a frequent neoliberal dissident on the subject of race. They wrote well and knowledgeably. And if I happened not much to agree with either of their points of view, well that is what Opinion sections used to be for ...
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OK, I’ve known these guys for years. I’ve interviewed Hicks and Woo, and once Joe even interviewed me. But it was nice to see them back. If only because they show a great familiarity with this particular city, its issues and problems. It might be going too far to say that bona fide ignorance of LA was a recent prerequisite for publication in the Times opinion pages.
Then again, it might not be--there was, for instance, that East Coast cartoonist called in for the mayoral election, who had to be prepped with tutorials by one of the many local political writers who’d just been dropped from the section. (Let it be admitted that, I am another of those writers.) The problem was basically, under editorial editor- in- passing Michael Kinsley, that the creaky but functional Opinion structure was torn down and a dysfunctional show tent arose in its place.
Kinsley and his ilksters felt they had a mandate to aggravate those who missed what had gone before, but more importantly, they also had no vision of what should replace it. Thus, the more readers protested against cartoon strips replacing those tidy, informative little lines of 10-point type, the more comix they got. And the more snarky, minatory editorial notes, telling everyone ``you better learn to like it.”
Thus, for the first time, this crucial Sunday section, created over 20 years ago to be the public expression of the paper, became instead the voice of its editorial arrogance. As seas of white space threatened to wash away its legible content altogether, a new, post-literate era was proclaimed in Opinion. As though driving readers away from the paper’s central core could somehow draw them to the rest of the paper. And luring the illiterate could make them read it.
There are historical reasons for this sort of desperate teardown. For the longest time, big newspapers were incredibly resistant to change. This is exactly why so many of them have died. For instance, the New York Daily News retained, well into modern times, every feature, nearly every columnist, every obscure little doodad, from the weird racetrack comic “Joe and Asbestos” to “The Correct Thing,” of its 80 years of existence: it was a tabloid junk shop.
Management maintained that to dump any one thing might risk 50,000 or so of its million readers, how would they know? A generation later, faced with sinking circulations and an invisible under-32 readership, newspaper managers are tossing furniture over the side like the crew of a punctured Zeppelin. But to not much greater purpose. Readership, revenues slip. Meanwhile, there’s a boom in Blogland. How do you get it to erupt on your territory instead? The answer, in the case of the Los Angeles Times: hire Kinsley, who started and ran a vaguely blog-like on-line publication for Microsoft. Put him in charge of editorials and opinions--the sections which, apart from comics and sports, are supposed to be the most read. Then, stand back.
Here is where I am going to differ from the journalist s who maintain that journalism has a lot to learn from blogs. Might not, on the contrary, blogs have things to learn from journalism? Like fact checking, open-mindedness and responsibility? What I have in mind lately and specifically here is the libel permeating Arianna Huffington’s blog about Times Reporter Judith Miller, that it was Miller who told the Bush Administration who Valerie Plame was married to. As though Bush/Cheney didn’t have resources of their own, and depended on private media briefings to find out to whom their employees were married. No, blogs have their place, as a medium for beliefs rather than knowledge, as a critique of the media, as a close-to-the ground tip wire--even as a mode of emotional expression socially superior to road rage. That role isn’t as a medium of record. To quote Robert Frost in another context, compared to journalism, blogging “is like playing tennis without a net.”
To the extent that he intended to bring the Opinion section’s discourse down to blog level, Kinsley succeeded. At least he succeeded in creating a new level of rhetorical stridency. Nothing seemed too far out. One wouldn’t have been surprised to encounter an op-ed defending slavery and cannibalism as being among the intended blessings of the Framers of our US Constitution.
Elsewhere, “charticles” replaced articles and white-space replaced print, all in a resounding triumph of form over content and even function. All without even a suspicion of originality. When Kinsley and Co. picked a new name for the section, were we really surprised that they selected “Current,” the name also chosen by that paragon of original thinking, Al Gore?
Meanwhile, Kinsley’s editorials themselves got stranger. To me, the apex was the day when all three--or was it four?--of the paper’s editorials attacked France, a country a good deal less important to this region than Peru. Increasingly, you suspected that with Michael Kinsley, you were in the hands of one of those very scary people who has a strong whimsical bent without a shred of humor. Plus he refused to live here. Oh yes, there’s that, too.
Of course, blame for Kinsley’s bizarre appointment goes to now-departed editor John Carroll, whose own abdication sparked Kinsley’s. Carroll picked Kinsley, who’d never edited a print publication with a circulation out of the ten-thousands, to be lord of the ed-ops in the nation’s second largest daily. This hiring rates down there with Gov. Jerry Brown’s pick of the judicially guileless Rose Ann Bird to head the state Supreme Court. It’s the kind of gesture in which it is impossible not to see a middle-finger-pointing condescension. The doomed appointee, of course, gets the shaft in the end.
Maybe the best obit for Kinsley’s LA career comes, appropriately, from another outsider, the New York Review of Books’ Mark Danner, who slashing into him for dismissing the Downing Street memos, assailed Kinsley's “deliberate impoverishment, a turning of inquiry and, at bottom, of curiosity into a dull and sterile game of black and white, played by rules that fail to reflect what everyone actually believes.”
Now he’s gone. Even if the Times didn’t deserve anyone better in his job, we do.
(This post originally appeared in the Los Angeles Alternative Press)
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| Posted by: Marc_Haefele on Thursday, September 15, 2005 - 04:48 PM
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