Last updated on January 14, 2014
From a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore on Fox News president Roger Ailes‘ biographers, admirers, and detractors:
It was easy to despise [William Randolph] Hearst. It was also lazy. Hating some crazy old loudmouth who is a vindictive bully and lives in a castle is far less of a strain than thinking about the vulgarity and the prejudices of his audience. In 1935, the distinguished war correspondent and radio broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing observed, “People who are not capable of disliking the lower middle class in toto, since it is a formidable tax on their emotions, can detest Hearst instead.” Ailes haters, take note.
This reminded me of what I wrote about a year and a half ago about the bashing of the New York Times‘ Nicholas Kristof that was then (and still is) fashionable in the development blogosphere:
I am not a Kristof fanboi. In fact, I thought Kristof’s live-tweeting of a police raid on a Cambodian brothel he had been invited to join in on was in poor taste, and I find the “White Savior” persona — in Kristof or anyone else – off-putting. (UPDATE: I also thought his criticizing a poor Malawian for smoking, drinking, and visiting prostitutes in this column to be beyond patronizing.)
But I also think the Kristof bashing is unjustified. Instead of criticizing Kristof for his writing, criticize those who enable it.
The New York Times is in the business of selling newspapers. Space in the New York Times’ editorial pages comes at a premium. Don’t think for a second that the New York Times would publish Kristof’s columns in its editorial pages if they didn’t correspond exactly to what the New York Times’ readership wants from a foreign correspondent.
These controversies surrounding Nick Kristof remind me of when my folks rant about oil companies raising gas prices before the start of a long weekend. I never fail to remind them that if they’re seeing such high prices, it’s because other consumers are willing to pay such high prices.
It is indeed one of the uglier sides of human nature that we so often default to the lazy thinking habit of blaming the supply side for simply — and rationally — responding to the demand side’s willingness to pay for something. This is a useful reminder for when I teach intermediate microeconomics this semester to make sure my students understand this.