Tierney Misses An Opportunity

John Tierney's column today (available here via Times Select), explores a recent study showing that Democrats far outnumber Republicans on the faculty of journalism schools. (The study was by David Horowitz, the conservative who is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.)

A good piece. Unfortunately, Tierney missed a golden opportunity to write about a subject that the Times has completely ignored -- the appointment of The Nation publisher Victor Navasky as chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. CJR is published by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where the faculty is 15 to 1 Democrat.

With few exceptions, Navasky's move to CJR -- which was hidden for many months until uncovered by the David M Blog -- has received virtually no coverage.

This is, unfortunately, typical of Tierney, who replaced the estimable William Safire as the Times house conservative some months ago. Unlike the feisty Safire, who was a useful counterweight to the monotonously hard-left editorial page -- particularly to offset its Israel-bashing-- Tierney has tended to pull his punches. Today's column is a good example of that.