If there's any movement going on, it's LB's mind opening a tad on the subject of the media... <g>
What? You accuse me of opening my mind? How dare you, madam!
www.DiscoverTheNetwork.org Date: 6/13/2005 3:30:21 PM
MICHAEL KINSLEY
Kinsley
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Editorial, Op-Ed and Letters Pages Editor of the Los Angeles Times
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Was Editor of left-liberal magazine The New Republic
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Was Managing Editor of the neo-liberal Washington Monthly Magazine
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Was Editor of Harper’s Magazine
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Was co-host of Crossfire on CNN
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Was founding Editor of Microsoft liberal webzine Slate
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Wife is co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Michael Kinsley is the Editorial and Opinion Editor of the Los Angeles Times. He is responsible for the editorial and letters page, the Commentary (Op-Ed) page and the Sunday Opinion section of this largest circulation U.S. newspaper west of the Rocky Mountains. He is also a writer for Time Magazine and a columnist for the Washington Post.
Kinsley was born in March 1951 in Detroit, Michigan, the son of a surgeon father and a homemaker mother. He attended Harvard University, working there as an editor at its student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, and graduated in 1972. He then attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and, as he later told journalist Ken Auletta, “turned into an Anglophile.”
In 1976 Kinsley was back in the U.S. to attend Harvard Law School. One of his Harvard teachers, Martin Peretz, had purchased the left-liberal magazine The New Republic two years earlier and in 1976 offered to make Kinsley its Managing Editor. Kinsley accepted and moved to Washington, D.C. where the magazine was located. (He graduated with a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School in 1977.)
In 1978, after resigning because of a spat with Peretz, Kinsley was rehired at higher pay as the magazine’s Editor. Kinsley “for the next dozen years…alternated in that job in three-to-four-year stints with Hendrik Hertzberg (now the editorial director of The New Yorker),” wrote Auletta.
“Peretz was a 1960s liberal who’d become disillusioned with the policies and the ethos of that era and moved rightward,” wrote Richard Blow in the neo-liberal Washington Monthly. “Michael Kinsley was a brilliant Harvard graduate with a mind that could see around corners…[with] a great talent for untangling the knots of people and policy in Washington, and an eagle’s eye for hypocrisy. Then something of an outsider in the capital, the nerdy, endearingly awkward Kinsley made the deftly executed hatchet job the magazine’s hallmark.
“At the time, the combination of ideological flexibility and merciless butchery of Washington’s sacred cows worked,” continued Blow, somehow neglecting to mention that Kinsley later briefly worked as Managing Editor of the Washington Monthly. “Who could forget Kinsley’s evisceration of Washington hack Bob Strauss….?”
In 1981 Kinsley was hired as the Editor of Harper’s Magazine and moved to New York City. He lasted 20 months during a struggle within the board of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which owned Harper’s, over who would control the magazine. The winner of this struggle, the leftwing black sheep of the family Rick MacArthur, ousted Kinsley on the pretext that Kinsley had accepted a junket to Israel. MacArthur then restored the more conventional leftist Lewis Lapham as the magazine’s editor. During Kinsley’s less than two years at the helm, Harper’s won a National Magazine Award for general excellence.
In 1983 Kinsley returned to Washington, D.C. to write The New Republic’s column “TRB,” which he did for the next 11 years. In 1985 he was again Editor of the magazine.
In 1989 Kinsley moved to England to work as the “American Survey” editor of The Economist Magazine. Seven months later he returned to Washington, D.C. to become the left host of the Cable News Network (CNN) debate show Crossfire, a position he held for the next six and a half years. (Kinsley’s mother Lillian had been a champion debater in high school.) He also became moderator of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) show Firing Line, which freed its longtime host William F. Buckley, Jr., to dispense with the moderator role and thereby to take sides in debates.
During these years Kinsley became a celebrity and wrote liberal opinion pieces for the Wall Street Journal and articles for The New Yorker and Time Magazine.
In 1987 Kinsley had published the first of his two books, Curse of the Giant Muffins and other Washington Maladies. In 1996 he would publish his second, a collection of essays and columns titled Big Babies: On Presidents, Politics and National Crazes.
During these years Kinsley also had small roles in three movies – Rising Sun (1993), Dave (1993, playing himself), and The Birdcage (1996).
What Kinsley wanted, however, was again to be the editor of an influential magazine, according to Auletta. In January 1994 he was offered the top editor job at New York Magazine. He accepted, then hours later retracted his acceptance, apparently because he had no desire to leave his suburban home in Chevy Chase, Maryland and “dreaded” the idea of living in New York City. His indecisiveness, he told Auletta, “was a midlife crisis.”
That crisis impaled Kinsley, who gave up his TRB column, grew a beard, and “spent a year and a half sulking over my stupidity in turning it [the New York Magazine job] down.” By spring 1995 “I was determined to be on the next train to pull out of the station no matter where it was going,” he told Auletta, “-- provided that I was the engineer.”
Kinsley discussed editorial opportunities with Time Warner, Inc. and then, after being told by writer friend Nicholas Lemann that Microsoft Corporation was looking for editors, approached fellow Harvard alum and Microsoft Executive Vice President Steven Ballmer about creating an on-line magazine for the wealthy, diversifying company.
Some at Microsoft were concerned that the liberal Kinsley, being “on the left,” might produce a magazine that would alienate many Microsoft customers.
“My politics are pretty eclectic, averaging out I suppose as a moderate-liberal with a libertarian streak,” Kinsley described himself at the time in an email to Microsoft executive Russell Siegelman. “One thing I would NOT be interested in would be being ‘paired’ with a conservative product. That would be unfair to me, and unfair to the real left. It’s one of the things I’m trying to get away from at Crossfire.”
Kinsley proposed creating an online magazine that would include “modules” or mini-magazines “from different political viewpoints. Not just left/right, but mainstream conservative; mainstream liberal; progressive left; libertarian; agrarian/luddite/unabomber (!); etc.”
Microsoft hired Kinsley, paying him, according to one source, “just under two hundred thousand dollars [per year], not counting a bonus.” Kinsley once described his income as “two-thirds of what I was getting just to do Crossfire,” but refused to confirm the amount either CNN or Microsoft had paid him.
Kinsley soon found that his magazine was but one of 50 media projects run by a division of Microsoft, and that he was an employee. Five days after Microsoft and NBC were launching the joint cable news channel MSNBC, Kinsley told a reporter: “I had no idea about it. I didn’t know they were planning to become a direct rival to CNN. That was a little embarrassing to me.”
Kinsley pressed on with plans, as Ken Auletta described them, “to build a weekly public-affairs magazine somewhat to the left of The New Republic but much quirkier than the pigeonhole he found himself imprisoned in as the ‘liberal’ on Crossfire.”
In 1995 Microsoft’s new magazine, Slate, was born. Its features soon included ongoing debates between famous pundits and scholars. The newborn Slate was certainly more liberal than conservative, but like Kinsley himself the new magazine exhibited liberalism of an eccentric, often unorthodox and Politically Incorrect variety.
One Kinsley innovation that ought to be widely emulated is an article published prior to each national election in which all the editors and staff writers at Slate reveal for whom they are voting and, in some cases, explain why. This allows readers to make a “windage” adjustment for the bias, right or left, of those who create the magazine’s contents. These self-exposing articles have revealed that Slate writers and editors vote Democratic 80-95 percent of the time; the small minority of Slate staffers who do not vote Democratic then, instead, to vote for third-party Greens or Libertarians or Ralph Nader, not for Republicans. A similar liberal-left tilt apparently shapes many of the staffs of the establishment media, but Kinsley, to his credit, established a tradition of making Slate honest and forthright about its own internal bias.
Rival Internet webzine Salon.com founder-editor David Talbot described Kinsley as “Bill Gates’ house pet.” Kinsley’s own oscillations between sarcasm and sycophancy, facetiousness and flackery, sometimes left readers confused. At one point Kinsley felt compelled to write: “We hope that Slate hasn’t attracted the kind of readership that needs the word ‘PARODY’ or ‘SATIRE’ or ‘HUMOR’ stamped on every bit of good-hearted raillery.”
Microsoft, Kinsley wrote, is a “saintlike, public-spirited, and compassionate company.” But Microsoft was asking Slate readers to pay $19.95 for a subscription, which relatively few were willing to do. After Slate quit charging this toll, critics charged that the line sometimes blurred between its articles and advertising, with articles not infrequently extolling Microsoft products and criticizing those of competitors.
When President Bill Clinton’s administration pushed anti-monopoly legal action against Microsoft in behalf of competitors such as web browser maker Netscape (a big Clinton financial contributor), Kinsley wrote: “There will be no major investigations of Microsoft in Slate.”
But while Kinsley sidestepped the legal battle over Microsoft, he kept publishing articles that said disparaging things about competitor Netscape’s products.
(The Clinton legal effort on behalf of a handful of Microsoft competitors who were Democratic contributors caused Microsoft’s stock value to plummet and the high-tech industry investment bubble to burst, which cost individual American investors and pension funds more than $1 trillion in lost value.)
Others criticized Kinsley for making Slate a conventional magazine that did too little to exploit the new potentials in digital publishing. It was in many ways deliberately intended to be like an old-fashioned print magazine that just happened to be published on the Internet. Kinsley ignored the advice of Internet consultant and Harvard classmate Esther Dyson that he and his magazine needed to be more “an intellectual bartender than a chef,” to be more interactive and less in control.
“Michael doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” Dyson told one reporter. “Generally, you want someone who’s a little kinder. You need to understand; you’re not in control. In the interactive world, the bartender doesn’t do all the talking.”
Kinsley’s surface often seems to exude smugness and superiority of an old-fashioned European sort. It’s little wonder, then, that one group of critics mocked Kinsley’s Slate by publishing a clever online parody magazine called Stale.
In 1999 Kinsley was named “Editor of the Year” by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).
In December 2001 Kinsley announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In early 2002 he retired from Slate (which in 2004 was sold by Microsoft to the Washington Post). Kinsley continued to write columns for Slate and for the Washington Post.
In 2003 Kinsley wed Microsoft executive Patty Stonesifer, who had been a key figure in the launches of Slate, MSNBC and the company’s digital encyclopedia Encarta. Kinsley and Stonesifer moved to Los Angeles, where she had accepted a job at the movie and media studio Dreamworks. Microsoft chief Bill Gates soon persuaded Stonesifer to leave Dreamworks and become co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with Bill Gates Senior. Co-chair Gates has become one of the loudest voices opposing congressional efforts to repeal the Estate Tax. (This “Death Tax,” is imposed on families solely because a loved one has died, and can take up to half of what a parent leaves to his or her children in the form of a family farm or small business.)
In January 2004 Kinsley became the Editorial and Opinion Editor of the Los Angeles Times. He was almost certainly hired to advance this newspaper’s continuing shift to the left politically. But Kinsley was soon attacked by left-liberal Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly over a conservative writer whose opinion piece Kinsley had published. This appeared to be a typical liberal attempt to censor and deny media access to those whose views the “liberal” Kevin Drum opposes.
In 2005 Kinsley was attacked by University of Southern California Law Professor Susan Estrich, who managed the disastrous 1988 presidential campaign of Democratic standard bearer Michael Dukakis. After Kinsley rejected an op-ed article she had submitted, Estrich publicly accused him of discrimination against female writers. As this argument heated, Estrich told Kinsley that the Parkinson’s disease he suffered “may have affected your brain.”
Subsequent research revealed that in the Los Angeles Times Kinsley during 2005 had published a higher proportion (20 percent) of female-authored op-ed pieces than had fellow liberal newspapers The New York Times (17 percent) or the Washington Post (10 percent).
As a writer Kinsley can occasionally surprise, delight or horrify readers. In May 2005, for example, his Washington Post column praised the “highly progressive” Social Security plan proposed by President George W. Bush.
In May 2005 Kinsley advocated embryonic stem cell research and opposed Bush Administration efforts to reign such research in with federal law. “Individual states are defying the federal near-ban,” wrote Kinsley. “So it seems unlikely that U.S. government policy will actually prevent a cure for Parkinson’s and other diseases.”
The human embryos destroyed in such research, wrote Kinsley, “are clumps of a few dozen cells, biologically more primitive than a mosquito. They have no consciousness, are not aware that they exist, and never have been. Nature itself creates and destroys millions of these every year. No one objects.”
“I have no trouble feeling that the government should value my life more than the lives of these clumps,” Kinsley continued. “God may disagree. But the government reports to me and to other adult Americans, not to God.”
In May 2005 Kinsley, with tongue perhaps only half in cheek, noted the rapid decline in the readership of newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times. In what might be a parody of his own welfare state socialist beliefs, Kinsley then proposed government subsidies to protect the newspaper business.
“The government,” he wrote, “must step in to stabilize the newspaper market through a program of ‘newspaper circulation supports’….similar to the agricultural price supports….”
“We must establish a Strategic Newspaper Reserve to reduce the nation’s dangerous dependence on foreign news,” Kinsley continued, and “The No Child Left Behind Act must be amended to guarantee that every young person in America graduates from junior high knowing how to read a newspaper.”
“Floyd Abrams, the nation’s most prominent and enthusiastic First Amendment lawyer, must come up with a reason,” Kinsley continued, “why cancelling your newspaper subscription, or failing to renew it, is unconstitutional….”
And finally, wrote Kinsley, “Find someone else to come up with three more points.”
In May 2005 the Los Angeles Times acknowledged that its average circulation had plummeted by almost eight percent since March 2004. Michael Kinsley took control of the Los Angeles Times editorial, op-ed and letters pages in January 2004.
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