In a Washington Post column last week, Michael Kinsley weighed in on Maureen Dowd's career:
When the New York Times anointed Maureen Dowd as a columnist nine years ago, I gave her some terrible advice. I said, "You've got to write boy stuff. The future of NATO, campaign spending reform. Throw weights. Otherwise, they won't take you seriously." The term "throw weights" had been made famous by a Reagan-era official who said that women can't understand them -- whatever they are, or were.
Dowd wisely ignored me and proceeded to reinvent the political column as a comedy of manners and a running commentary on the psychopathologies of power. It is the first real innovation in this tired literary form since Walter Lippmann. Eighty years ago, Lippmann developed the self-important style in which lunch with a VIP produces a judicious expression of concern by the columnist the next day about developments in danger of being overlooked. Most of today's columns are still variations and corruptions of this formula. But Dowd is different, and she is the most influential columnist of our time.
This makes me crazy. It's true that Dowd has been "the most influential columnist of our time." But that's not all to the good. In fact, she's arguably been the most destructive columnist of our time, playing a role in the trivialization of our political discourse over the last 10 years that can hardly be overstated. When Kinsley says "a running commentary on the psychopathologies of power," that's code for her proclivity for cheap shots at caricatures of political figures, whose inner thoughts and private life she regularly speculates about without concern for accuracy or fairness. And that's assuming she goes beyond rote name-calling and pained attempts at pop-culture references (see "SpongeBush SquarePants"). The fact that she won a Pulitzer Prize is a blight on the good name of journalism.
(Reference: Spinsanity on Dowd. Also, Josh Marshall had a good article on Dowd that was published on Feed Magazine in 1999, but I can't find it online. Does anyone know where it is?)
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