The NYT announced last week that Bono (yes, that Bono) was joining its Editorial Page as a real columnist. While talking about this news with The Guardian, the NYT editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal, Mr. Rosenthal notes that Brian May (guitarist for Queen with a Ph.D in Astrophysics) will be back, and that he is a fan of Bruce Springsteen’s op-eds. But he also makes this claim:
Though rockers and pop stars are welcome, another group faces an uphill battle on to the New York Times’ editorial page – conservatives. “[US Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice is a particularly bad op-ed writer,” Rosenthal said. However, the problem doesn’t end there. “The problem with conservative columnists,” Rosenthal said, “is that many of them lie in print.” And they can’t sing.
Um, yeah? The lying is a feature, not a bug with the kind of conservative columnists they think will add to the NYT audience.