Jonah Goldberg, a prolific pundit and co-founder of The Dispatch, which aspires to be the central repository of non-Trump conservatism, has signed on for a gig with CNN. For this act, he has drawn a fair amount of criticism from commentators such as the inimitable Stephen Green (a/k/a Vodkapundit), who foresees that “Goldberg will likely fall into the role of the ‘concerned conservative’ at a far-left network, earning his keep by [bathroom vulgarity] on conservatives”.
Why foresee that? Jonah (in this informal age, I can call him that, because we once shook hands and conversed for several sentences) hasn’t followed the path of Jen Rubin or Bill Kristol or Joe Scarborough. Occasionally, he takes shots at Donald Trump, some of them less than entirely fair. (He seems to believe that the allegations of Putin-Trump collusion were “fake but accurate” and not always to be sure of “fake”.) Still, any right winger who reads a selection of his non-Trump columns without seeing his byline will be bound to conclude that he is no new-fledged leftist, nor even very close to the center of the political spectrum.
It’s obvious to me why CNN made this hire. It wasn’t to get a tame house conservative (I think that Max Boot is available for that job) but because, in the wake of multiple scandals and the prospect of much flinging of soiled laundry as Fredo Cuomo fights for a golden severance package, the higher-ups at its owner, Warner Media, have figured out that the Liberal Bias space in the infotainment ecosphere is overcrowded while opportunities abound for straight news coverage and multifaceted commentary. Somebody in the C-suite (well, maybe a lower level of the alphabet; CNN probably rates little more than Z-suite attention at this point) evidently thinks that Jonah Goldberg will help with the transition from Jeff Zucker’s disastrous reign.
Curiously, when Kevin Williamson, no more of a Trump booster than Jonah, was hired by The Atlantic, nobody on the Right claimed that he was going to earn his keep by subjecting conservatives to unfossilized coprolites. There was universal dismay when the magazine, in an act of idiotic cowardice, fired him for offending the staff with his wrongthink. Jonah would probably have an equally short tenure, were it not for the fact that no sane executive at Warner Media cares whether the current CNN mob is offended. I suspect that their mass resignation would be welcome. It would certainly do CNN a great deal of good.
So, my best wishes to Jonah. May he torment Tapper and Acosta and the rest until they flee to safe spaces at MSNBC.
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