Off the Record
March 2, 2005 Media&Society 2005 THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, L.P.
by Tom Scocca
"I’m looking forward to being surprised," New York Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins said. Ms. Collins was elaborating on The Times’ March 1 announcement that reporter John Tierney would be the newest addition to her stable of Op-Ed columnists.
Mr. Tierney, Ms. Collins said, is an "out-of-the-box" thinker with a knack for contrariness. Her department, she said, "has never quite recovered" from a 1996 piece that Mr. Tierney wrote for The New York Times Magazine, in which he argued that recycling was futile.
"As an editorial board, we really do love recycling a lot," Ms. Collins said.
Mr. Tierney fills a vacancy created by the retirement of William Safire. Like Mr. Safire, he is seen as starboard-side ballast on a page accused of listing to port.
But also like Mr. Safire, Mr. Tierney is not a yellow-dog Republican. "My inclination is libertarian," Mr. Tierney said.
Whether or not they agree with Mr. Tierney’s assessments—down with rent control! Up with automobiles!—Times readers should benefit, Ms. Collins argued, from having their "universal truths" challenged. "It’s still just really useful to be exposed to these kind of things," Ms. Collins said.
If some of Mr. Tierney’s pronouncements may be unexpected, his appointment was not. Ms. Collins said that The Times had looked a list of a dozen possible candidates (some of whom, she added, may never have realized they were under consideration). But Mr. Tierney’s career has traced a more or less perfect trajectory toward an Op-Ed column, and Mr. Safire’s retirement created a more or less ideal spot for him to land.
"I’ve had editors starting with Joe Lelyveld saying, ‘You should think about trying to write there someday,’" Mr. Tierney said. " … It was always a hope of mine."
Author Christopher Buckley, Mr. Tierney’s longtime friend, said that Mr. Tierney’s position as a right-leaning Times columnist wasn’t always foreordained. When the two met at the Yale Daily News in 1973, Mr. Buckley said, "I’d have bet all the tea in China against it." The young Mr. Tierney, Mr. Buckley explained, was "redistributionist, socialist, he was anti-authoritarian"—though not, Mr. Buckley added, to the point of "throwing Molotov cocktails at the National Guard."
"So it’s really quite fascinating to have watched that evolution," Mr. Buckley said.
Mr. Tierney is known for a puckish, often conceptual approach to reporting. "He brings as much zest to the table as a half-dozen lemons," Mr. Buckley said. In 1999, Mr. Buckley recalled, when Rosie O’Donnell criticized a crackdown on the city’s homeless, Mr. Tierney showed up on the sidewalk outside the actress’ suburban house, unshaven and shabbily dressed, and wrote about being rousted—a stunt it’s hard to imagine Paul Krugman carrying off.
It’s not as easy to do shoe-leather reporting on the federal government as it is on metro-section subjects in New York, Mr. Tierney allowed. "No, there’s an awful lot of phone-leather here," he said.
John Podhoretz said Mr. Tierney’s hiring brings "a welcome addition of actual levity to the page." Is he funnier than incumbent rightish contrarian David Brooks? No, Mr. Podhoretz said. "Few people are as funny as David Brooks," he added. " … He’s funny in a different way."
During last year’s Democratic convention, Mr. Tierney distributed surveys to his fellow reporters about which candidate they were supporting—then, to isolate the effects of their professional self-interest, he asked them which potential President they would rather report on.
Mr. Tierney did vote in the 2004 Presidential election, he said, but he declined to say whether that vote had been for George Bush or John Kerry: "In the last campaign, I had plenty of objections to both candidates."
Mr. Tierney said that unlike some newly minted columnists, he doesn’t anticipate any nightmares about blank pages. Having already written the biweekly "Big City" column for the metro section, he said, he has learned a central lesson of column-writing: "Somehow, the space does get filled."
Ms. Collins said that Mr. Tierney’s metro experience "reduces the trauma" of launching the column. "The trick of being able to do something twice a week at 705 words … it’s a very unusual gift, so it’s nice to have somebody who has already done it," she said.
While Mr. Tierney is inheriting Mr. Safire’s newsprint real estate, he is not inheriting his predecessor’s well-appointed corner office. That space, with its burgundy leather couch, will be taken over by Thomas Friedman, according to a source in the Washington bureau. Mr. Tierney, currently in a cubicle, will inherit Mr. Friedman’s old digs.
This column ran on page 6 in the 3/7/2005 edition of The New York Observer. |
