Frank Rich to leave The New York Times: a view from the samizdat ... by gimleteye

I wasn't always a fan of Frank Rich. When he was the New York Times main theater critic and I was aiming to write for the theater, Rich's blistering reviews had all the subtlety of a natural gas explosion. We moved on but never far from view.

In this fucked up world, Frank Rich's editorials in the Times-- sometimes three times as long as standard opinion pieces-- stood out as a beacon of clarity if not hope. News that Rich is leaving the Sunday Times is deeply troubling. I can live with the mystery why Rich is leaving one of the most important posts in journalism to a monthly column at New York Magazine. I can't live without a muscular New York Times. Without Frank Rich or someone as keenly observant, the Times is a weaker newspaper.

For more than 30 years, Rich lent the Times uncompromising luminosity on American politics. He was one of our most clear-headed observers of the radical right and its horrid results. As a cultural and political commentator, Rich has the great talent to weave facts in the narrative to which they belong, exposing fabrication, lies and decoding the world we live in. If there is another voice at the Times who can do Rich's work, as well, it would be good to know.

I dislike writing of Rich, in an elegiac way. We are the same generation. Again, it is the Times that worries. Like all major newspapers, the Times is suffering. Last night, I offered a friend a view: that a cultured society would not throw the newspaper business to the Internet wolves, leaving us all to Google News and pathetic advertising vehicles like Fox and ignoramuses masquerading as men and women of sober wisdom. But we are not a cultured society. We are a society made up mostly of idiots, with an even higher percentage in our legislatures and Congress: the underlying fact that pushed Frank Rich to one of the loftiest perches in American journalism.