Newspapers II: The Decline & Fall of MoDo

When the history of the New York Times' long slide from grace and profitability is written, there should be a chapter for op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd, who has gone from being a must-read to an obnoxious crank.

Don't get me wrong. There are far too many op-ed political columnists who are as dull as dishwater (Broder and Collins come to mind), but agree with their opinions or not, there is usually some semblance of a factual underpinning for what they write.

Not so with Dowd. At least not any more, and to use an old newspaper term, she's been phoning it in for some time now. Translation: MoDo may go through the motions of researching a subject but merely throws a bunch of words together -- the edgier the better in her instance -- and presto! she gots herself a column.

My break with the Queen of Snark coincided with the collapse of the TimesSelect subscription firewall last September, when hers and other op-ed columns could again be read for free.

I had declined to pony up for TimesSelect and quickly found that I didn't miss the op-ed crew. (Frank Rich was an exception because, sentimental soul that I am, I have continued to buy the dead tree edition of the Sunday Times). Nevertheless, I was shocked when I resumed reading MoDo again and found that someone who was cogent and moderately amusing on her best days wasn't having good days any more and had become a bottom-feeding trivializer.

Grant you, Dowd has plenty of company and the 2008 presidential campaign has been a feast for journos and pundits for whom the fire has gone out but still can generate plenty of smoke.

John McQuaid says it well in an article at the Huffington Post titled The Political Media Freak Show: What Went Wrong?:

"What went wrong?

"I've been thinking about this for a piece I've written, not yet published. And it's a strange convergence of trends. One of those trends is . . . Maureen Dowd. More than anyone else, Dowd legitimized "character" -- not character, but a kind of flip shorthand for reading surfaces and political images that passes as insight into character. Twenty years ago, this was a great innovation -- you could write impressionistically about campaigns! You could dig underneath the carefully-crafted image, revealing some truth beneath the hucksterism! I loved Dowd for this, and still do -- but less and less these days. This technique -- call it ripping off the mask -- has become the alpha and omega of political journalism. It assumes the mask is a lie designed to mislead, and there is always going to be an embarrassing truth lurking underneath it."

Actually, I think McQuaid is being too deferential because MoDo has become to the liberal media what Ann Coulter is to the right-wing media, and that plain old sucks.

Hat tip to Will Bunch at Attytood