Fit To Print

The Interconnected Fates of Krugman and Castles

January 29th, 2008

It was not till the 2000 presidential election that I began following politics seriously. I got most of my news from the New York Times and then began watching all the cable shows in the weeks building up to the election. During the recount and the court debacle I watched hours and hours of CNN and MSNBC every day. After a while of this, I started wondering where all the sane analysis had gone. The pundits on cable news were entirely void of substance, and even the op-ed pieces in good papers like the Times didn’t seem incredibly relevant or insightful.

Then came Paul Krugman, who forcefully and consistently pointed out the idiocy of the Bush Administration, and the harm it was doing to the nation; first with the tax cuts for the rich, and then with the disastrous war. The rest of the Times staff and the mainstream media were notably uncritical of the war until late 2004, when things had gone so poorly for so long, there was really no other way to cover it. As Courage and Journalism are still nursing the wounds of a decades-old divorce, Krugman deserves tremendous respect and admiration for getting the two to reconcile, if only for the couple days out of the week that his column runs in the paper.

But the story does not end there, my friends. Oh no, it does not. Krugman also tossed in a plug for talkingpointsmemo.com in a late 2002 op-ed. This turned me on to a whole world of online bloggers, the best of whom took the idea of ethics and accuracy much more seriously than the “professionals” in the mainstream media. These guys have since gained a good deal of well-deserved credibility, and many of them now write their blogs out of the offices of quality periodicals, like the American Prospect and the Atlantic Monthly.

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