Two weekends ago the New York Times' Week In Review section launched an op-ed series called "Transitions," in which it promised to provide "a series of Op-Ed articles by experts on the most formidable issues facing the new president." The first installment (11/23/08), on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, featured seven op-eds. FAIR's Peter Hart broke it down:

Three were enthusiastic Iraq hawks (in the cases of Rumsfeld and Chalabi, that's an understatement). One other--Cordesman-- was an important voice in elite foreign policy debate who supported the invasion. Another contributor worked for Petraeus. Those perspectives are "balanced," so to speak, by a pro-invasion author and a journalist who seems to advocate a rather middle-of-the-road perspective.

This weekend, the Times was back with more "Transitions," this time on "“The Challenges of the Economic Crisis" (11/30/08)--and it did little better.

The lineup this time: a former Bush I official who was later Giuliani’s chief economic policy adviser and is also a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution; a managing director of Goldman Sachs, co-writing with a historian who penned a scathing review of Paul Krugman’s latest book in which he declared that Krugman was "maybe not really an economist" because he didn’t believe in laissez-faire; George W. Bush's former director of the National Economic Council and a fellow at the conservative AEI; an FDR scholar; and Joseph Stiglitz.

Stiglitz pushes some more progressive economic medicine, but it's hardly a balanced crew--not to mention that every single one of them is a white male. What, no women, no people of color have opinions on the economy valid enough for the Times to seek out and highlight?

Tags: Joseph Stiglitz

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Economy, New York Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.