Reasonable People Can Disagree On Whether this Tire Fire is Hazardous for Your Health
By 
But the Times op-ed page, as judged by its regular columnists, imposes fairly strict limits on which ideas are exchanged. It runs from the standard right-wing propaganda of Stephens, to the centrist bromides of David Brooks, to a moderate liberalism that cheers Trump’s bombs on Syria and boos student protesters at Middlebury, to the howling wasteland that is Thomas Friedman’s column, where he screams gibberish at a merciless sky. (His last contribution to public discourse was a blow-by-blow description of playing golf in Dubai with a yogi. Truly, we are blessed.) When she is not describing her intolerance for weed chocolate, Maureen Dowd is commending Donald Trump for being the true dove in the presidential race. Frank Bruni, meanwhile, does whatever it is that Frank Bruni does.
The op-ed page is unbearably white—spare a thought for Charles Blow—and predominantly male. There is space for Ross Douthat to casually wonder if there’s a case to be made for a bigot like Marine Le Pen, but none whatsoever for a bona fide socialist, even though America’s most popular politician is a democratic socialist. Stephens isn’t even a particularly cogent or striking conservative—he’s bog-standard neoconservative material. His hire can’t even be defended as an attempt to understand the populist insurgence upsetting the Republican Party.
Stephens’s hire is therefore evidence of a much older problem at the Times. The guiding philosophy—if there is one at all—seems to be an unthinking embrace of the “both sides” approach to journalism. It doesn’t matter what discredited conservative ideas are in the paper of record, as long as they’re broadly considered “conservative.” Thus management can assure itself that it is being appropriately even-handed—no matter how badly this undermines the good work its reporters produce.
But politics is not a binary matter, especially now, when all the lines have been scrambled. It can’t be reduced to a simple liberal v. conservative divide, and if you tried the result would be a slate of columnists that is eerily two-dimensional.
It’s only possible to hire a writer like Stephens if you have no serious moral or intellectual objections to his views. The editors at the Times fall back on one axiom and elevate it to the greatest moral standard of all: the need for intellectual diversity. Bennet calls it a “free exchange of ideas.” Public editor Liz Spayd says it’s the antidote to a “liberal orthodoxy of thought.” The paper’s deputy Washington editor, Jonathan Weisman, dismisses Stephens’s critics as imbeciles who can’t stand “a conservative presence.”
This is a cop-out, in each instance; a form of anti-intellectual cowardice deployed to absolve the paper of any responsibility for its decisions. There is an inescapable moral dimension in granting anyone a column of such reach. A Times column confers prestige on the person who writes it, as well as on his ideas. It tells readers: “Here is an important thinker, stop and pay attention.” It is not so much a free exchange of ideas, which will fall and rise on their inherent worth, but a tipping of the scales.
Clearly, the only answer for the Times is to bring Bill Kristol back.