What was The New York Times thinking when it hired neocon propagandist Bill Kristol for its op-ed pages?
Eric Alterman
Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 12 books, most recently We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel (Basic Books, November 2022). Previously, he wrote The Nation’s “Liberal Media” column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman
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Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
The New Republic Was In Trouble Long Before Chris Hughes Bought It
The reign of Marty Peretz rendered the storied magazine less influential—and less liberal.
Posted inArticle
Cruisin’ With Miltie
Ten or so years ago, the good folks at The Nation were nice enough to send me on a week-long cruise of Alaska put on by National Review for its readers. (I did not realize at the time that I was actually doing recognizance for the wiley and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky’s business plans. I […]
Posted inArticle
Contra Gates
The president announced his pick to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense today: former CIA director Robert Gates. Bound to surface in the coming national scrutiny of Gates is his role in the Iran-Contra affair. One of the great misconceptions of the Iran-Contra scandal is the widely-held belief that when then-Attorney General Meese called […]
Posted inArticle
Stone Cold Untruths
It is with a great sense of foreboding that I feel compelled to address myself to Paul Berman’s New York Times Book Review essay on Myra McPherson’s biography of I.F. Stone and a collection of Izzy’s best columns edited by Peter Osnos. I don’t think I have ever met McPherson, but I have […]
Posted inArticle
Where FDR Went Wrong
President George W. Bush was a lot closer to right than he usually manages when he placed the Yalta agreement, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, in the context of the agreements that viewed “the freedom of small nations [as] somehow expendable.” What Bush, like most Republican critics before him, misses, however, […]
Posted inFeatures
Wake-Up Time
Are our national media — schoolyard silly during campaign 2000, by turns somnolent and sycophantic ever since — starting to rouse themselves from their long torpor? It’s still way too early to answer that question with a “yes,” but if that’s what the answer turns out to be, the first week of February may have […]
Posted inFeatures
Books in Review
Bush at War By Bob Woodward. Simon & Schuster, 376 pages, $28.00 It was 3 p.m. when the phone rang. “Ring, ring, ring.” It was the same sound it usually made, but this time with a difference. The nation was at war. And Bob Woodward had a new book out about it. So when the […]
Posted inFeatures
Book Review: Ambling into Nonsense
Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush By Frank Bruni. HarperCollins, 278 pages, $23.95 New York Times reporter Frank Bruni has written an instructive, important book about the state of modern American political campaigns and American democracy. Unfortunately, he appears to have done so by accident. Bruni’s Ambling into History purports to […]
Posted inFeatures
Listening to Lyndon
Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964-1965 Edited by Michael Beschloss. Simon and Schuster, 475 pages, $30.00 When dealing with the amazing personality of Lyndon Baines Johnson, there is just no substitute for an encounter with the real thing. This is an inescapable conclusion of reading the second volume of Michael Beschloss’s […]
