Alex Pareene: The War Room Hack Thirty: One view of the "worst columnists and cable news commentators America has to offer." Looks to me like more print than broadcast, but I watch so little TV, read so few of their papers, and never listen to radio, so I'm not to best person to sort this out. I don't recall ever reading Richard Cohen, and several other names come up blank. On the other hand, I can think of others who escaped the list. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and their ilk were exempted as entertainers, or maybe their demagoguery is so blatant that they don't pretend to be anything else. This isn't really a list of right-wingers, although they figure prominently, and isn't a ranking of vile political opinions (otherwise Michael Savage and Max Boot and Mark Steyn would have ranked high). Pareene namechecks Ann Coulter, then picks the decidedly more mediocre Laura Ingraham. Self-conscious centrists figure prominently, especially ones who fell hook, line and sinker for the Bush war line (lies not least of all). But that may be less because they're centrists than because they're gullible when the propaganda winds blow strong, and that's ultimately what defines them as hacks. As for active right-wing propagandists like Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, and David Brooks, they tripped themselves up so repeatedly they couldn't be ignored as mere ideologists.

This was done as 31 separate posts, so work through the Earlier Articles links or pick and choose from the index. Nearly all are worth reading. And the Thomas Friedman one has links to two Matt Taibbi reviews that nail him perfectly. [Links: The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded]

1. There's no subject on which Richard Cohen is not completely inessential. The looming debt crisis? Caused by kids today and their tattoos and hippety-hop music! The financial collapse? Did you know that Richard Cohen went to high school with Ruth Madoff? 'Cause that's all he's got.
2. Repetition of White House spin is a fairly noxious trait in a journalist, but [Mark Halperin]'s worst quality is actually that he is constantly wrong. He is a professional political analyst, yet he often seems to be completely, 100 percent wrong about even the horse-race aspects of politics that he specializes in.
3. [Thomas Friedman]'s a silly, simple-minded man whose success leads a cynic to the conclusion that the world is run by similarly silly, simple-minded men.
4. [David Broder] has a simplistic understanding of politics and no understanding of the electorate except as an abstract concept. His hatred of partisanship is actually a thinly veiled disdain for popular rule itself.
5. Because [Marty Peretz] fancies himself both the nation's foremost authority on Middle Eastern affairs and a scintillating writer, he has named himself editor in chief of [New Republic], and his work goes up before a grown-up can look it over. [ . . . ] Peretz can't make it through a simple account of the concerts and dance performances he enjoyed on a recent trip to Tel Aviv without lobbing a few bombs at those judged to have treated Israel unfairly -- in this instance, Elvis Costello, the Pixies(!) and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
6. In the growing pantheon of "Bush speechwriters hired as columnists," Marc Thiessen's moral depravity set him apart.
7. Jonah Goldberg writes the political column equivalent of weekly fart jokes, but longs to be taken seriously as a public intellectual. [ . . . ] Goldberg favorite rhetorical move is to pretend that he's making some grand, semi-controversial point, then back off when asked to defend it. He wrote an entire book called Liberal Fascism, about how liberals are the real fascists, but constantly insists that the theme of his book was not "liberals are fascists." He wrote a column about how Julian Assange should be assassinated, but insisted that the point of his column was not to say that Julian Assange should be assassinated. Did you know that proposing that kids perform community service "is modern slavery"!? ("No, national service isn't slavery," he eventually writes, before saying, again, that it's basically the same thing.)
8. But I don't think even Maureen Dowd is still into Maureen Dowd anymore. Dumb insults mysteriously scrubbed from a column, the "plagiarism" scandal in which Dowd revealed that she "weaves" unedited e-mails from friends into her column, the equally stupid "dateline" incident in which she had an uncredited assistant do the reporting while she filed from Jerusalem, all of these point to a hack whose heart isn't even in it anymore.
9. And most of [Peggy Noonan's] columns follow a similar pattern: Rambling anecdote (probably involving Reagan), misty-eyed reminisce of a Catholic girlhood in a more pleasant America, paean to Grown-up Seriousness in our politicians, pro forma endorsement of some randomly selected item from the Republican Party platform. Things were better before, and that is why we need tort reform, or English as our official language, or tax cuts.
10. Laura Ingraham is just awfulness personified. Pointless, talentless, a second-rate Ann Coulter without the wit. Her day in the sun is long gone, her novelty has evaporated, and yet still she remains. Old shameless right-wing TV stars never die. They just move into talk radio and release horrible books.
11. George Will is a sanctimonious moralist, a pretentious hypocrite, a congenital liar and a boring pundit, to boot. [ . . . ] And his baseball writing is so bad as to defy parody.
12. [John Fund] just picks the latest stupid Republican outrage (voter fraud! Black Panthers! ACORN!) and dutifully lies about it, using predictable talking points and the requisite Monday Meeting spin.
13. But this list would be incomplete without a representative from Politico, the world's most cynical media outlet, and [Roger Simon] is guilty of most of its worst practices.
14. The sad thing is, [David Ignatius]' expertise is supposedly foreign policy, which makes his respect for warmongering numbskulls like John McCain and Joe Lieberman even more inexplicable than David Broder's.
15. [Mort Zuckerman] is a conservative Democrat, sort of. It's hard to pin him down, actually, because, as Wayne Barrett once documented, he's on both sides of every issue.
16. But as a political commentator [Michael Barone]'s proof that encyclopedic knowledge does not lead to insight. He is, in most respects, your bog-standard right-wing pundit. Ensconced at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and penning predictable columns for the right-wing Washington Examiner, he regularly appears on Fox to say the sorts of things that analysts who regularly appear on Fox should say.
17. While it's one thing to be consistently wrong about everything in the pages of your own magazine, it's quite another to remain a paid opinion-giver at other supposedly serious media outlets despite that impressive record. But [Bill Kristol] manages it, and the Washington Post continues to print his uninteresting lies and obviously incorrect predictions.
18. While [Tina Brown's] comically shallow columns on actual current events resemble real editorials, they tend to lack a point, besides reassuring the reader that Tina's been keeping up with the news out of Wall Street and Washington.
19. [Joe Klein] is a man who's internalized his own noxious bullshit. First of all, Gore received more votes than his straight-shooting opponent, which is traditionally how we measure who "won" an election. Second of all, he "lost" not because Joe Klein thought he "seemed stiff" -- though Joe Klein and his peers made sure that everyone in the nation knew how "stiff" he seemed to them -- but because a Supreme Court with a partisan Republican majority halted the Florida recount.
20. You can always count on Howard Fineman for a clear distillation of whatever the new conventional wisdom is. Unlike those who seek to drive coverage, Fineman was always content to sway with the prevailing winds. [ . . . ] And Fineman, it should not be forgotten, was a member of that special class of pundit that trashed candidate Al Gore for complete nonsense and worshiped post-9/11 Bush as a decisive man of action. He was as psyched as anyone when George Bush led us into a pointless war.
21. An atheist who wrote a book about the liberal media's attack on "Christian America" (they gave the Narnia movies bad reviews because they hate Jesus), S.E. Cupp is the sort of commentator who'll declare creationism legitimate solely because liberal scientists say it isn't. She's not a moron or a nut, she just declares common cause with them to get ahead in the field of punditry. [ . . . ] On cable she plays the hip, young Republican girl-about-town -- who also loves hunting! There's nothing a booker loves more than an attractive young woman with the mind of Fred Barnes.
22. [Tucker Carlson] is a thin-skinned mess of hypocrisy. [ . . . ] After getting fired from all three 24-hour cable news channels, Tucker decided to start a website. It would be a smart website, he promised! With real journalism! [ . . . ] It has settled on being more like a low-rent Daily Beast, or HuffPo with poorer standards of reporting and slightly fewer celebrity nipple galleries.
23. [Howard Kurtz's] Media Notes columns for the Washington Post were just lengthy recaps of what bloggers said about things and while he often enjoyed policing journalists for potential conflicts of interest, he never addressed the fact that the Post's media reporter was a paid employee of Time Warner's CNN, where he hosts a media chat show.
24. Humor generally needs to come from some sort of point of view to have real bite, but [Dana Milbank] did not count as an "opinion columnist," so the message behind his work -- the grand, overarching theme -- was basically "isn't all of this -- the theater of legislating, the passion of activists, the entire political process -- a stupid, pointless game played by idiot clowns?"
25. [Mickey Kaus] obscures his beliefs in 100 layers of obnoxious gnomic in-jokes, but his reflexive hatred for unions and immigrants colors nearly every post (when he's not complaining about the L.A. Times). Unions and immigrants are responsible for stagnant wages, the jobs crisis, the failure of G.M., etc., etc.
26. There's a special circle of hell for the journalist whose mendacity or incompetence directly leads to actual war. Jeffrey Goldberg's work in the New Yorker helped get us into Iraq. He wrote false and stupid things that helped lead to the deaths of thousands, and he has never seemed even slightly sorry about that fact.
27. Pat Caddell is the epitome of a Fox Democrat. He was a high-level party apparatchik in the distant past and can theoretically still be referred to as a Democrat, but he'll reliably repeat every idiotic right-wing talking point that comes down the pike. And he doesn't just do it on Fox. With his partner in failure, fellow former Democratic pollster Mark Schoen, he also pens a neverending series of ponderous editorials (printed, usually, in the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal) about how the Democrats are wrong, stupid and doomed.
28. Andrew Malcolm is a political blogger for the L.A. Times, where his job is to craft every story in such a way that maximizes its chances of getting linked to by Matt Drudge.
29. These are all allusions to a center-right consensus that exists solely among comfortable Washingtonians (from both parties and neither party), treated as if it represents the national ideal. So [Matt Bai], charged with covering the modern progressive movement, covers it as if its naiveté about the role of government in a post-industrial economy is a given fact, rather than the opinion of the guy writing the story.
30. But politics has very little to do with what makes [David Brooks] Brooks. He is simply the laziest smart writer on the planet. [ . . . ] The actual "reporting" that went into the book [Bobos in Paradise] -- bits in which Brooks struggles to spend more than $20 on dinner in the exurbs -- was rather definitively shown to be totally false. But the "truth" of his insights into the differences between blue America (Thai restaurants!) and red America (Applebee's!) was immaterial. Here was a highbrow Jeff Foxworthy joke, and the liberals ate it up. [ . . . ] Occasionally he writes something exceptionally stupid or suprisingly vile, but mostly he just plays his part as a PBS Newshour Conservative.

I scanned through the comments for more names. Most often nominated, by far, was Charles Krauthammer, but also: Fouad Ajami, Fred Barnes, Bob Beckel, Wolf Blitzer, Max Boot, Neil Bortz, L Brent Bozell, Andrew Breitbart, Tom Brokaw, Pat Buchanan, Alan Colmes, Joe Conason, Monica Crowley, Victor Hanson Davis, Lou Dobbs, Ross Douthat, Paul Gigot, Bernard Goldberg, David Gregory, Sean Hannity, Melissa Harris-Perry [aka Melissa Harris-Lacewell], Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz, Arianna Huffington, Al Hunt, John Kass, Michael Kinsley, Nicholas Kristof, Matt Lauer, Michael Ledeen, Mark Levin, Mara Liasson, Rich Lowry, Gene Lyons, Michelle Malkin, Ruth Marcus Chris Matthews, Megan McArdle, Dick Morris, Keith Olbermann, Bill O'Reilly, Kathleen Parker, Daniel Pipes, Frank Rich, Cokie Roberts, Charlie Rose, Michael Savage, Laura Schlessinger, Bob Schieffer, George Stephanopoulos, Mark Steyn, John Stossel, Andrew Sullivan, Cal Thomas, Chris Wallace, Juan Williams, Bob Woodward, John Yoo. I left out the Salon writers (e.g., one commenter repeatedly taunting Joan Walsh), and I'm inclined to dismiss Sullivan and most of the liberals (Kinsley, Rich) as pure right-wing snark.

One letter writer complained about the parochial American viewpoint and suggested some more names: Nick Cohen, Mick Hume, Melanie Phillips, Brendan O'Neill, Frank Furedi, Helen Guildberg, Josie Appleton, Bernard Lewis, Barry Rubin, Sam Tannenhaus, John Podhoretz, Emanuele Ottolenghi, Giulio Meotti, Reuel Marc Gerecht.

I'm an habitual listmaker myself, so let me say something in defense of lists: the ranking may be near-arbitrary, but building lists forces one to think of aggregates rather than individuals, and as such it puts individuals into a reasonable context. Clearly, a lot of thought goes into who's in/who's out/who ranks where here, and it provides not just a useful guide to individuals but to the whole practice of the opinion wing of the mainstream media. Given its breadth, this strikes me as the most useful broad survey since Matt Taibbi took on the presidential news reporters in 2004 by refereeing Wimblehack (won by Elisabeth Bumiller, something to keep in mind any time you see her byline).