Abolish Michael Kinsley!

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http://www.slate.com/id/2120890/

Abolish Michael Kinsley!
Why editorial pages are obsolete.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, June 14, 2005, at 3:33 PM PT

Long live the op-ed Click image to expand.

Long live the op-ed
"What happens to the institutional voice?" asks Jack Nelson, former Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. He is complaining about my friend and former boss Michael Kinsley's plan to have outsiders write some of the L.A. Times' editorials. It's a question best put in the past tense. The institutional voice of the Los Angeles Times was always something of a fiction. Whose opinions were these, anyway? A small team of editorialists couldn't possibly represent the views of something as sprawling as a large newspaper staff; and anyway, convention dictated that said staff wasn't supposed to have (or at least express) views at all. During my six years as a reporter in the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, my opinions were nearly always in opposition to the line laid down by the Journal's conservative editorial page, and the same held for most of the other reporters I knew, too.

The editorial page has never really represented the opinions of the newspaper's owners, either, unless you're prepared to believe that the typical newspaper owner formulates on a daily basis three or four detailed opinions on matters of local, national, or international significance. (I'm lucky if I can come up with one opinion a day, and I don't bear responsibility for paying Slate's bills.) The L.A. Times didn't become a good newspaper until the publisher, Otis Chandler, started ignoring the broadly reactionary impulses of the other owners within the Chandler family. As I understand it, it was the relatives' dissatisfaction with Chandler's transformation of the L.A Times into a newspaper of the first rank that eventually convinced them to sell the L.A. Times to the Tribune Co. Chain ownership of newspapers has demolished even the pretense that a newspaper editorial board represents the views of its owners. The Tribune Co. will frequently express one opinion in an editorial at its flagship paper, the Chicago Tribune, and then turn around and express the opposite opinion in an editorial in the L.A. Times........