Journalistic Centrism Defined

Remember this past Sunday, the day of the Super Bowl, when Andrew Klavan wrote his post here at PJM on “Why I’m Canceling My SI Subscription,” after Sports Illustrated’s hit piece on religion and the NFL? Yesterday, Hugh Hewitt interviewed the article’s author, slumming New York Timesman Mark Oppenheimer, for two hours on his radio show. The whole transcript is online, but this moment is a classic:

HH: All right, I want to dig into this, because as you know, your Sports Illustrated article is extremely controversial.

MO: So I’m told. I mean, it wasn’t controversial to me, but I imagine it seems that I upset some people.

HH: Oh, did you ever. So we’ll talk about that, but first, let me put you on the geography of ideology, if I could.

MO: Sure.

HH: Are you left wing?

MO: No, I wouldn’t say I’m left wing.

HH: You’ve got to have voted at least four times for president. Can I assume it was Gore, Kerry, Obama, Obama?

MO: You may assume that, yes.

HH: Is that correct?

MO: Yes. Now we should say, by the way, that I have left wing friends, and they think that voting for those mainstream sort of neo-liberal consensus candidates puts me if anything somewhat to the right.

Now that’s some serious MSM triangulation.

As Charles Krauthammer* once wrote, using an appropriately football-themed analogy, “As has been the case for decades, American politics continues to be fought between the 40-yard lines. The Europeans fight goal line to goal line, from socialist left to ultra-nationalist right.”

I’m sorry Hugh didn’t ask for names; I’d love to know who’s lining up so deep into the Red Zone of American politics that he thinks that voting for Gore, Kerry, and Obama puts one “somewhat to the right.” Other than Pinch Sulzberger and the denizens of the Times’ editorial bullpen, that is.

* In the Washington Post, where numerous journalists also think that Obama is “somewhat to the right,” but only when they’ve lost faith in their own religious beliefs.