Bill Kristol at the NYT and Barack Obama at the Drudge Report

A pair of stories caught my eye today, and I'm not sure I care about either one.

The first bit of news is that conservative pundit and writer Bill Kristol is going to be a weekly op ed columnist at the NYT. The second story is that some Barack Obama ads popped up on the conservative Drudge Report Web site (though it's not clear that Obama actually ordered the ads - lots of times, ads just pop up because they're running on thousands and thousands of sites, and Drudge's just happens to be one buried in the mix).

So the question looms: Is it wrong for the Times to hire Kristol, and for Obama to (maybe) advertise on Drudge?

First, Kristol. Unlike FOX News, an arm of the Republican part that only hires liberals who don't come across as fierce as their conservative counterparts, the real "media" in America tries (or thinks it's trying) to be objective, even when it ends up skewing too far to the right (but that's for another day). So why shouldn't the NYT hire both conservative and liberal op ed columnists? And in fact, it always has. Some say that Kristol is particularly bad (and wrong about everything, including the war) and thus doesn't deserve a slot at the greatest of newspapers. Really? He's worse than Novakula? Than Krauthammer? Than George Will? Than Coulter, who is syndicated around the country? Than the LA Times hiring Jonah Goldberg (whom I sat next to once on CNN and is no Bill Kristol)? What conservative pundit does merit writing for the New York Times? They gotta hire someone, and they're all equally bad. I just can't get that worked up by a real newspaper hiring a conservative pundit to write as as a conservative pundit. Having said that...

More on the NYT and Kristol, Obama and Drudge, Newsweek and Markos and Rove, and finally Hillary's own conservative ad buy, after the jump...

...did the Times also announce the hire of a new liberal op ed writer, to balance out Kristol, or are we yet again seeing the mainstream media move more and more conservative in the vain hope that eventually the right-wingers will stop beating them up (and calling them "liberal") if only they bend over far enough? This is what the Washington Post did a few years back when it inexplicably hired a right-wing blogger to write an online column that was intended to be a view from the right, but they didn't at the same time hire a liberal blogger to right a view from the left. No one at the Post, including their somnambulant ombudsman, could fathom why folks might get upset about adding a self-declared right-wing opinion column to a Web site that had no self-declared left-wing opinion columns. Republicans have so played the media refs that the media is not only NOT liberal, it's not longer objective. Our press tries so hard to play fair, it now often plays foul. If the Times is only hiring Kristol to address some conservative furor over the Times' liberalism, then the newspaper is in for a big surprise. As Democrats in Congress have learned only too well the past year, give in to bullies and they'll kick even more sand in your face the next time.

This all reminds me of the criticism of Newsweek for hiring Karl Rove and blogger Markos Moulitsas of liberal blog Daily Kos as regular political opinion writers. Some folks on the left freaked that Newsweek would hire arch-conservative Rove, and others on the right (mainstream journalists, among others) fretted that Markos wasn't a real journalist. Yes, well duh. He wasn't hired as a journalist, he was hired as a political partisan, which he is, to write partisan opinion pieces. Say what you will about Rove or Markos, but the notion that either of them wouldn't be an interesting addition to a partisan political discussion is absurd. And in any case, Newsweek did it right - they hired both at the same time.

Which takes me finally to Obama and the Drudge ads. If Obama thinks it helps him to advertise on Drudge (and it's not clear he even did), why should I care? Yes, I'd like Obama to buy a few ads on AMERICAblog too, but does that negate him buying ads on right-wing sites? Hell, I'd like Ron Paul to spend some of his $20 million on AMERICAblog (Ron, call me). And let's not forget that Hillary bought her own little spate of ads on conservative blogs months back.