Politico media columnist Jack Shafer tore into both The New York Times and columnist Bret Stephens, all but outright stating that he believes readers would be better served if Stephens stopped writing.

Shafer’s column lambasts Stephens’ piece, which cited the work of a eugenicist to argue Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent than other people.

“The Times disavowal and re-edit (tellingly neither cosigned nor acknowledged by Stephens) was too little and too late—if you’re going to edit a piece, the smart move is to edit before it publishes,” Shafer wrote. “If Stephens and his editors want to insist he was merely misunderstood, they do so at their own peril.”

“Did Stephens seek the advice of an editor before he filed his column? Perhaps his future success at the Times could be assured by finding a sturdy editor willing to sign off on slapdash, embarrassing copy like the “The Secret of Jewish Genius.”

What’s good for the columnist is not always good for his publication. Several hundred columns into his run, even the wisest columnist exhausts his store of ideas and starts repeating himself. That’s not so terrible if the ideas can withstand the tensile torture of being recycled, but such robust ideas are rare, and it becomes time to send the columnist to pasture.

But because columnists come to regard their jobs as tenured, lifetime positions, moving one to a new beat or (god forbid!) a non-columnist position is too emotionally draining for most top editors. So instead, they wait for the columnist to approach retirement age and cull with a buyout.”

“Maybe he should start looking for a job in management or an easy post at a journalism school?” Shafer muses near the end of the piece, calling on both Times editors and Stephens to think about “whether his ‘Jewish Genius’ column was a miscue or cue for a curtain call.”

Stephens’ piece came under heavy criticism soon after it was published and editors later appended a note saying they removed references to the eugenics study Stephens cited. The note also said it wasn’t Stephens’ “intent” to argue “Jews are genetically superior.”

Bret Stephens’ latest column (https://t.co/6ECSD0oWe8), which argues that culture and history drive Jewish achievements, has been edited to remove a reference to a paper widely disputed as advancing a racist hypothesis. We’ve added the following editors’ note to the column. pic.twitter.com/Aj7eU3Fce2

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) December 29, 2019

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2Q9xzkA