By Joel Thurtell
I just don’t get it.
The geniuses who run the New York Times op-ed page.
Why don’t they pick me?
I don’t have any lucrative government contracts.
Why, I don’t have any kind of government contract.
I don’t own or partly own any oil companies in former Soviet republics.
So why won’t they publish my op-ed pieces?
I’m referring to recent demi-scandals involving lapses in Times efforts to make sure that self-aggrandizing doesn’t sneak into the newspaper’s august pages.
Boom-boom. It happened twice in recent weeks, and each time the Times got caught.
Egg on their face.
Embarrassing public apologies.
Could have been avoided.
How?
Why, they could have used my essays.
As I say, I am not well-connected to former Soviet republic oil companies, and I don’t have a $400,000 contract with the federal government to analyze anything.
But instead of hiring me to write their little op-ed pieces, the Times went for broke.
They used the work of a guy named Jonathan Gruber. He’s a health care economist at MIT. Now, there is prestige for you: MIT.
The Times published his op-ed column about health care reform. Later, the editors learned that Gruber has a $400,000 contract to analyze health care reform for the Obama administration.
Oops.
Could have avoided that nastiness if they’d used my piece.
Of course, I don’t have MIT emblazoned on my letterhead.
Wonder if that made the difference.
Then there was the even more embarrassing gaffe the Times made by publishing a piece by Peter Galbraith, son of famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, advocating independence for Kurdistan. Too late, the Times found out that Galbraith the Younger stands to make millions from his investment in a Kurdistan oil company.
Darn! Fooled again!
Now there’s all kinds of hand-wringing at the Times and mea culpas flying through the editorial pages as the newspaper tries to figure out how to keep making fools of themselves.
I could have told them: Use my stuff.
Over the years, I guess I’ve sent more than a dozen of my essays to the Times. Never had a response.
A friend works in PR at a prestigious state university here in Michigan. He tells me one of his more onerous assignments is hawking proposed op-ed pieces written by professors. It goes without saying that the profs, being profs, are too busy to do their own shilling. Busy men and women of consequence. Because the profs can’t be bothered, my friend cultivates editors at various newspapers and when the need to vend an op-ed piece comes along, he makes calls to those people and paves the way to publication. Shh! He even re-writes the profs’ work! One of the offices he targets is none other than the op-ed shop at the New York Times.
I don’t know if any of my friend’s professor-clients have outside contracts that might be a conflict of interest according to the Times’ ethical guidelines. Somehow, I doubt that those academic essay-writers are being vetted at the level required by the Times. But when newspapers accept pieces that are promoted by third-parties, in effect using agents to bring work to their attention, they are begging for trouble.
Ever notice how many Times op-ed pieces are written by people with a published book to peddle? How does that happen? I can’t prove it, but I suspect the work of literary agents in at least some of those cases. Not the author, but the paid agent makes the arrangement to publish the piece.
In such cases, the incentive system is aimed the opposite way from what the Times wants. Agents want results. In the case of literary agents, they get a cut of the fee. In the case of the university PR official, performance evaluations may well include rate of success at placing clients’ essays. Motivation is tilted towards nondisclosure of compromising facts like $400,000 consulting contracts or investments in oil companies whose fate is tied to the subject of the op-ed column.
On the other hand, I understand the dilemma of the op-editors: Which is easier, accepting a piece of writing that’s glad-handed through the door by someone they at least know as a chummy voice over the phone, or diligently sifting through hundreds of “unsolicited” essays from nobodies like me who addressed their work to oped@nytimes.com?
Truth is, writings sent by outsiders like me are no more “unsolicited” than those pitched by agents. Anyone who tries to sell a story is, by definition, soliciting.
Last week I thought I’d try once more. I e-mailed my essay, “Right to Offend,” to the Times. I thought it was almost as well-written as your run-of-the-mill Times op-ed piece, and it has the national and even international appeal preferred by the Times.
Nothing back.
Then on Sunday, January 17, 2010, I read Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s flagellation of the Times op-editors in the Galbraith and Gruber cases.
After all that humiliation, they’ve learned nothing.
They had an untainted piece–mine–to publish, and chose to ignore it.
I do not feel sorry for them.
Stay tuned, Mr. Hoyt–I have a feeling you’ll be soliciting more mea culpas.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
