The New York Times' Republicans-only Opinion Feature

A regular New York Times opinion feature includes outside writers -- but only conservatives

If you read yesterday’s New York Times, you likely came across a feature headlined “‘Trump Brought Darkness; Harris Brought Light’: 14 Writers on Who Won the Presidential Debate.” If you read it closely, you might have noticed that of the 14 writers in question, eight work directly for The New York Times and six are outside contributors. The eight Times employees include a relatively even mix of liberals and conservatives.¹ The six outside contributors, on the other hand, are 100 percent conservative.

Wild, right? Well, we’re just getting started.

The New York Times published similar features after each night of the Democratic convention last night. Four nights, four pieces, a total of 13 appearances by outside contributors with clear ideological backgrounds or affiliations … all 13 of them conservatives.

And we are not done yet!

In July The New York Times did the same thing for the Republican convention: Four nights, four pieces, a total of 17 appearances by outside contributors with clear ideological backgrounds or affiliations … all 17 of them conservatives.

All together these nine opinion roundups feature 36 appearances by outside contributors with readily-apparent ideological backgrounds or affiliations — and all 36 are conservatives. (To be clear, there are fewer than 36 people involved; the Times turned to most of the right-wing writers multiple times.)

Here’s the list:

Dan McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review (4 times)

Josh Barro, former Manhattan Institute fellow (3 times)

Katherine Mangu-Ward, Reason Magazine editor (4 times)

Kevin Williamson, most famous for advocating hanging women who have abortions

Kristen Soltis Anderson, Republican pollster (8 times)

Liam Donovan, Republican strategist formerly with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (5 times)

Matt Labash, writer formerly with The Weekly Standard (7 times)

Matthew Continetti, founding editor of Free Beacon; also previously of National Review and The Weekly Standard

Peter Wehner, worked in three Republican presidential administrations (3 times)

That’s two (2) guys named Matt who used to work for The Weekly Standard and zero (0) liberals.

Two (2) people who are literally Republican Party political operatives, and zero (0) liberals.

The Times’ own roster of columnists is relatively ideologically diverse. Not perfectly so, and I have plenty of objections with the paper’s decision to give such a platform to consistently dishonest writers like Bret Stephens, but the roster in general and as featured in these “X writers react to Y” roundups is fairly diverse. But the fact that the outside voices the paper turns to for these roundups are exclusively conservative speaks volumes about the paper’s biases and agenda.

In case you are so inclined: letters@nytimes.com

1. Charles M. Blow, Jamelle Bouie, Ross Douthat, David French, Pamela Paul and Lydia Polgreen, Binyamin Appelbaum, Michelle Cottle. Some of them fit more neatly than others on an ideological spectrum. I’m not particularly interested in debating in this space where each of them lies on such a spectrum.