You may have heard about Bloomberg View, the new opinion offering from New York mayor and media mogul Michael Bloomberg's empire. Bloomberg assembled a bunch of relatively high-profile people from journalism, politics, and other arenas, paying them what are surely ungodly sums to write reasonable opinion pieces. Slate's Jack Shafer goes to town on it:
The columnists' extreme reasonableness and to a lesser degree the low temper of the first four editorials tell you everything you need to know about why there is no Bipartisan Party or why nobody ever named their newspaper the Daily Bipartisan. As journalistic fire starter, bipartisanship or reasonableness or post-partisanship or whatever Bloomberg would call his guiding philosophy has to rate with ice water. The USA Today editorial page and op-ed section is reasonable. Who reads it? Send me the readers who crave columns and editorials written at a whisper, and I will horsewhip them back into their senses.
There are two related questions here: Whether readers ought to or will find Bloomberg View's offerings intriguing and informative; and whether the propagation of this type of reasonableness will help our system arrive at good solutions to policy and political problems. The answer to the first question, I'll predict, is that few citizens will read Bloomberg View directly. But I'm guessing that the company will make an effort to enhance its contributors' already substantial reputations by helping them get on television and promote their other works (not that it's tough for Peter Orszag to get his op-eds published or anything). That will make Bloomberg View appear influential and important, no matter how dull most of its content is.
As to the second question, it's hard to imagine an enterprise devoted to reasonableness having much of a salutary impact. First of all, reasonableness, like centrism, is a philosophy that only exists in relationship to other philosophies. The centrist doesn't know what he believes until you tell him what other people believe, so he can put himself between the poles. Likewise, a policy idea only seems unreasonable because it resides somewhere between what supposedly less reasonable people are advocating.
That isn't to say you can't produce lots of compelling and convincing ideas that don't line up with what the parties are saying. But that doesn't seem to be what Bloomberg View is doing; they don't seem to want to offer anything too challenging to the establishment types who will be reading the site. Which is fine. But think what they could have done, with all their money, if they decided to promote some truly innovative thinkers.
