All the Nepotism Fit to Print?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
On the decision of Commentary magazine to bring in as editor in 2009 John Podhoretz, son of the magazine’s second editor, Norman Podhoretz, we’ve already commented; it strikes us that the decision, by the current editor Neal Kozodoy, puts the magazine shrewdly on track to extend, expand, and enliven its long record of distinction in covering the battle of ideas. But wouldn’t you know, the news was followed by a dirge in the New York Times about how the decision “reeks,” as the Times put it, “of the ‘old nepotism.'”
Where is the self-awareness at the Times? The newspaper is — as James Taranto pointed out yesterday on the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com— chaired and published by Arthur Sulzberger Jr., son of Arthur Sulzberger Sr., himself a scion of the long line of family ownership. What in the world could possibly possess a newspaper with its history of family ownership to take out after Commentary for bringing in John Podhoretz, particularly when the new editor has a long record of success in the free journalistic marketplace?
