John Tierney to replace Safire at NYT

[StClone]

What should we know about Tierney? I haven't seen any indication of his political leanings.

John Tierney, journalist
From Wikipedia

John Tierney, 51, is a journalist who has worked for the New York Times since 1990. Author of "The Best-Case Scenerio Handbook" (2003), Tierney was named on March 1, 2005 as an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, taking over for the retired William Safire.

From NYT:

he New York Times today named John Tierney as an Op-Ed columnist, with his columns scheduled to appear twice a week, beginning in April.

"John is a smart reporter and innovative thinker who will always come upwith an unexpected take on the issues of the day," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times.

Mr. Tierney, 51, has been with the Times since 1990, and more recently, wrote the weekly "Political Points" column during the 2004 presidential campaign.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/business/media/01cnd-tier.html

[Demit]

1. Lengthy piece on him in American Prospect

dated September 2001, but looks like a thorough dissection. Oh, goody, puckish provocation! Sounds like just what we need in these whimsical times.


"... Tierney's best friend and fellow conservative gadfly, Forbes FYI editor Christopher Buckley, calls Tierney "a bit of a merry prankster" but concedes that even his pranks have a political point. When out-of-town liberals like Rosie O'Donnell and Hillary Clinton were attacking Mayor Rudy Giuliani for clearing the homeless off the streets, Tierney dressed up as a bum and slouched on the sidewalk outside O'Donnell's Westchester County mansion. A cop promptly forced him to move on....

What is this man doing at the Times? In seven years of writing "The Big City," Tierney has built a reputation as a provocateur whose journalistic sallies tend to target New York City's liberal elite. Underneath the urbane, whimsical-prankster sensibility, however, is a fairly straightforward ideological mission. Despite its title, Tierney's column is not entirely a reporter's notebook of random musings about Gotham. It's closer to a series of briefs for laissez-faire. ...

Tierney's ability to blend ideological crusade and puckish provocation is an important factor in his rise at the Times. The paper nominated him for a Pulitzer last year, and there are murmurs of a promotion to the op-ed page. Along with featured nonliberals William Safire, Maureen Dowd (whom Tierney used to date), and Times Magazine contributor Andrew Sullivan, he's part of the conservative counterbalance to a paper whose moderate leaders view it, perhaps too charitably, as liberal.

...

Tierney's closest equivalent is not William Safire, who was indeed brought onto the op-ed page for ideological balance, but Maureen Dowd, another Irish Catholic writer with a fondness for mockery. "The snotty style is in these days," observes New York University communications professor Todd Gitlin of the pair. Another journalist-media critic, former New York Daily News columnist Jim Sleeper (author of Liberal Racism), describes Tierney and Dowd as "safety valves"--outlets for dissent from the Times's liberal values. Sleeper stakes out political terrain somewhere between the Times editorial page and Tierney, whose writings he admires. For more steadfast liberals, however, the conservative columnists at the Times are less safety valves than emblems of the paper's shift away from its historic liberalism. ..."

more at http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/16/mooney-c.html

[K-W]

2. So he is a facist.

Spreading the myth of a liberal elite to create a foil for conservative supermen.

Just wonderful.

[oasis]

3. Safire is lying scum. An amoeba with a pencil would be an improvement.