In January 1973, two months after Richard Nixon’s resounding election victory, the New York Times announced that it was adding a new columnist to its opinion pages: William Safire, a speechwriter for Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew. Safire would go directly from bashing news outlets like the Times on behalf of a dishonest, press-hating administration to one of the most prestigious posts in American journalism.
Safire’s appointment provoked howls of protest from many Times readers and staffers. The paper received nearly 200 letters about Safire in the months after his hiring, 92% of them critical. Editorial-page editor John Oakes wrote to the publisher urging him to fire the paper’s first ever conservative columnist, saying Safire’s articles “degraded the Times” and represented “an insult to its readership.” (The memo is preserved in Oakes’s papers at the New York Public Library.)
Safire remained, and the Times has continued to employ conservative pundits ever since. Today the paper has 19 regular columnists, 4 of whom are conservatives. All four, however — David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, and David French — are Never Trump conservatives. These writers have taken a principled stand (and I happen to think three of the four are excellent columnists). But using them to provide ideological balance on the page, as if they represented a widely held viewpoint among today’s Republicans, is wishful thinking at best and willful ignorance at worst.
New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger stated in December 2023, “Today we have a far more diverse mix of opinions, including more conservative and heterodox voices, than ever before.” Yet there are no voices representing MAGA, the dominant strain of thought on the right. I expect this to change in 2025. Sulzberger and executive editor Joe Kahn, in multiple interviews, have expressed a dogged insistence on hewing to the ideas of objectivity and balance, even when it angers their left-leaning subscriber base.
Of course, a potential subscriber backlash is not the only argument against hiring a pro-Trump columnist. The MAGA movement’s authoritarian underpinnings, enmity toward journalists, and disregard for facts all contradict the fundamental values of The New York Times (and most other independent news organizations). It may be a challenge to find a writer who can channel the viewpoint of the American voters who favored Donald Trump in 2024 while still honoring the principles of responsible journalism.
Some might say none of this really matters, because the opinion pages of newspapers no longer dominate political discourse the way they once did. Yet in a twist I’m sure no one predicted, the biggest media story of the 2024 presidential campaign centered on editorial-page endorsements. In this instance, the Times stood out by issuing a full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris and denunciation of Donald Trump, sparing it the torrent of resignations, subscription cancellations, and scorn that The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times received for their last-minute decisions to endorse no one.
The Washington Post already has a pro-Trump columnist, Marc Thiessen, who has been writing for the paper since 2010. (Like Safire, his previous job was as White House speechwriter for a Republican president.) The Los Angeles Times, in the weeks after the election, hired Scott Jennings (a pro-Trump commentator who had been writing occasional columns for the paper since 2019) to join its editorial board. Those two newspapers also have a longer history of publishing columnists whose right-wing views clashed with their editorial-page ideology.
The Los Angeles Times, despite shifting from the right to the center in the 1960s, had a roster of columnists in that decade which included the segregationist James L. Kilpatrick, the National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., and a press-bashing defender of the extreme-right John Birch Society, Morrie Ryskind.
The Washington Post published Kilpatrick’s column as well (though only after he had renounced segregation), along with the right-wing duo of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, plus its in-house conservative George Will, who recently received a glowing tribute from the paper on the 50th anniversary of his column.
The New York Times, compared to these competitors, has historically shown extreme reluctance to grant unabashedly right-wing writers a regular spot on its opinion pages. But the paper’s current leaders seem to dread being perceived as part of the resistance to Trumpism. The odds are that they will cave to reality and hire a columnist who actually believes in today’s dominant right-wing ideology, like it or not.
Matthew Pressman is an associate professor of journalism at Seton Hall University.
