It Is Time to Send Maureen Dowd Packing

Posted by Don Hazen, AlterNet at 12:12 PM on August 15, 2008.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has evolved into a destructive force. Her pieces are almost purely gossip, innuendo, and meanness; worst of all they are often wrong. I used to enjoy her writing; she was frequently funny, and her cutting take seemed more focused on the forces of evil. Now, more often than not, she is the evil, generating paranoia without a purpose -- her own brand of the politics of destruction.

Did something happen along the way to reprogram her writing brain? Was it the publishing of her book and how it was received that has stimulated her inner misanthrope? The work she has been producing is not good journalism or op-ed writing. I don't know what her family was like growing up, but it must have been pretty vicious -- playing gotcha all the time, and forcing her to make stuff up as she went along.

So a thank you to Salon's Joan Walsh, who today gleefully writes:

I'm always happy when events conspire to prove that a nasty Maureen Dowd column was fantasy as quickly as possible. It only took a day to disprove her fanciful depiction of Hillary Clinton trying to topple Obama in Denver, "Yes, She Can."

Dowd was pushing the line that Billary and their forces were at work to undermine the Obama effort by insisting on a separate roll-call vote. But it seems that Barack and Hillary can actually get along when the chips are down.

The Clinton and Obama campaigns announced jointly that her name will be put into nomination Wednesday, Aug. 27, in Denver, and there will be a roll-call vote. The two teams are still working out the mechanics, a Clinton aide said, but it looks like each state will announce its tally for both candidates "I am convinced that honoring Senator Clinton's historic campaign in this way will help us celebrate this defining moment in our history and bring the party together in a strong united fashion," Obama said in the campaign statement.

The role of Dowd in the larger political landscape is increasingly a topic of hand-wringing.

Booman of the Booman Tribune is irate about those people who are stuck in time and still believe that Dowd is a member of the left.

This is a message to my old friends trapped in amber. Maureen Dowd doesn't root for Democrats. She uses her column to mock Democrats, drive wedges between Democrats, and to reinforce negative stereotypes about Democrats.

But Booman's real message is that Dowd is all about destruction.

While the column [same one Walsh is writing about above] is ostensibly about the Clintons' 'solipsistic' behavior, the real motivating force is to light a match to the raw feelings that have carried forward in the Obama and Clinton camps from the primary.

Booman adds:

It's August 13th. Dowd does two columns a week. If she doesn't take any time off, she'll write thirty-three more columns between now and the election. I guarantee you that the majority of them will not be helpful to the cause of Barack Obama.

And how many will criticize John McCain?

So yes, Dowd's column gets read a lot -- she is frequently at the top of the list of most read articles in the Times -- but is this all that matters to the Times? Things are bad enough in society that we don't need to celebrate viciousness twice a week in one of the most powerful editorial platforms in news. Journalism should be about afflicting the comfortable, and comforting the afflicted, but Dowd's writing is about afflicting everyone, without a purpose in sight.

Tagged as: journalism, clinton, obama, new york times, mccain, maureen dowd

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.