The High Wingnuttery: Hoisted from the Archives from May, 2005

A correspondent chasing links emails me that the fever swamp that is National Review has thrown more of the links to its archives down the memory hole into the fire.

Indeed:

Neither "search" nor "find" appears on National Review's homepage these days--naughty, naughty!

So I am reduced to trying to find it via google, which directs me to: http://www.nationalreview.com/author/donald-l-luskin.

And then finally to the document--I like the attention to detail and typography in that interesting capitalization of the possessive "S" that nobody ever bothered to set right:

Donald Luskin: A Public Editor'S Parting Shot: "Ring up a win for the Krugman Truth Squad!...

It’s official: According to the New York Times itself, what we’ve been carefully documenting for more than two years is true.... [Danny] Okrent could have gone much, much further in blowing the whistle on America’s most dangerous liberal pundit. He could have cited the dozens upon dozens of partisan distortions, uncorrected errors, deliberate misquotations, and flat-out lies that we’ve caught Krugman making over the years.

For that matter he could have echoed what N. Gregory Mankiw, the universally respected former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, told Fortune in a recent interview--that Krugman ‘just make[s] stuff up.’ Okrent knows all these things. I know he knows them, because I’ve met with him and corresponded with him about just these matters since he became the Times’s ‘public editor’ 18 months ago. Our e-mail correspondence on Krugman totals almost 40,000 words (some of which was ‘off the record,’ so I’m using my judgment here in determining what portions are fair to reveal now that Okrent’s tenure as ‘public editor’ is over). Yes, I’m the one Okrent was talking about when he referred to ‘Krugman’s enemies.’ So why didn’t Okrent go further with his critique? And why, as the self-described ‘readers’ representative,’ did he feel it was necessary at the same time to take a gratuitous swipe at me — one of his readers?

I suspect, primarily, a fear of reprisal.... Last Friday Krugman told a lecture audience in Princeton that, essentially, Okrent had lost his marbles--that his ‘very peculiar blast’ was the result of ‘constant pressure’ from conservatives that had ‘built up a list of grievances in his mind.’ Let’s talk about ‘pressure.’ It so happens that, by sheer coincidence, I was in Princeton on business last Friday. But I decided it was best not to attend Krugman’s lecture, because the one time I did attend one of his many public appearances he proceeded to say on national television that I had stalked him. Okrent knows how the pressure game works. So he kept his ‘blast’ against Krugman modest and took out an insurance policy against charges of bias by slapping me a little bit, too.

Okrent wasn’t always afraid of pressure. When I first met him in early 2004 he was full of the burning zeal of the reformer, and eager for intellectual allies. His first words to me were, ‘You’re much better looking than Paul Krugman.’ He told me that the Times didn’t deserve to be called the ‘newspaper of record’ and vowed, ‘When I’m done with this assignment, I want everyone to know that.’ (Okrent later wrote on this theme.) We had a long discussion on accuracy and fairness on the op-ed page.... This was all very hopeful, as well as flattering. But I knew it wouldn’t last. Okrent ended our meeting by announcing that a limo was picking him up to take him to a dinner party with Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., and executive editor Bill Keller. I wondered how long Okrent could maintain his independence as a reformer if he was getting sucked into the glittery social world of Times management. The pressure had begun.

And the pressure built as Times staff fought Okrent in his role as ‘readers’ representative.’ For example, financial reporter David Cay Johnston went so far as to organize other reporters into what Okrent called a ‘lynch mob’.... For the most part, corrections were not made.... When I couldn’t get Collins to even acknowledge my e-mails, I sent corrections to her under a false name, but she didn’t respond to those either. I learned that at one point Okrent went directly to Krugman himself for corrections, but the whole exercise soon proved worthless. Okrent apparently gave up on Collins and Krugman, and I gave up sending them corrections as well....

The pressure on Okrent from readers appeared to reach a peak just before last year’s bitter presidential election, when the Times had become increasingly partisan in both its editorials and its news stories. In a long-awaited October column on whether or not the Times’s campaign coverage was biased, Okrent cited views from readers on both the left and the right before asking,

Is The Times systematically biased toward either candidate? No.

What, you are no doubt wondering, could Okrent possibly have been thinking? Whatever it was, he wasn’t thinking about the Times’s coverage of the presidential campaign, which was self-evidently biased toward John Kerry to the point of self-parody. No doubt he was thinking about the hundreds of e-mails from the Angry Left that flooded his mailbox each day--for he concluded his column with this:

I do want you to know just how debased the level of discourse has become. When a reporter receives an e-mail message that says, ‘I hope your kid gets his head blown off in a Republican war,’ a limit has been passed. That’s what a coward named Steve Schwenk, from San Francisco, wrote to national political correspondent Adam Nagourney several days ago because Nagourney wrote something Schwenk considered (if such a person is capable of consideration) pro-Bush… As nasty as critics on the right can get (plenty nasty), the left seems to be winning the vileness derby this year…

With this, Okrent had not only succumbed to the pressure from the Left, he had cracked under it. Here we had the ‘readers’ representative’ using the mighty power of the New York Times to lash out at one of its own readers, naming that reader by name, calling him a ‘coward,’ and quoting him not only without his permission, but in defiance of his pleading not to be quoted.... I believe that in the end his allegiance was to the sacred institution of the New York Times--a ‘church,’ a ‘synagogue,’ a holy place, what Okrent called a ‘daily miracle’ in a column last December. Is that the kind of loyalty a couple of rides in a limousine can buy?

So, Okrent ends his 18-month term as the Times’s ‘public editor’ a broken man, having turned against the readers he was supposed to represent, having failed to institute a single significant reform and, worst of all, having acted as a fig-leaf behind which the paper has continued to do its partisan worst.

I still have no explanation from a whole bunch of people far outside the fever swamp of National Review--Fred Hiatt or Jonathan Weisman come immediately to mind--of just what they were thinking when they, for years in the 2000s, presented Donald Luskin as an authoritative voice on macroeconomic issues.

And I have asked.