In a recent dispatch on coronavirus, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman complains that he is “stunned by the criticism that anyone talking about saving lives and jobs in the same breath is an unfeeling capitalist.” Given that Friedman has long opposed job security as an impediment to progress, innovation and national competitiveness—even lambasting the US Congress in 2004 for being “out to lunch—or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith’s job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean” (how’s that for unfeeling capitalism?)—it’s not clear why he’s suddenly concerned with saving US jobs in the middle of a pandemic.
As for Friedman’s own highly remunerated job (as of 2009, his speaking fee alone was no less than $75,000), this year marks the 25th anniversary of his service as foreign affairs columnist at the Times, where he has held various posts since 1981. To put it another way, Friedman has been writing a column on international relations for more than 50 Friedman Units—to use the metric coined by blogger Atrios (5/21/06) in honor of the pundit’s penchant for declaring that “the next six months” were always the critical ones in Iraq (FAIR.org, 5/16/06).
Unlike Susie Smith, Friedman’s livelihood has never been in jeopardy, despite his myriad professional defects. These range from rhetorical incoherence and continuous self-contradiction (e.g., Iraq was “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched,” even as Friedman self-defined as “a liberal on every issue other than this war”) to his tendency to imbue utterly frivolous jet-setting experiences with global political significance (e.g., that time on an Emirates Air flight from Dubai when the Pakistani passenger sporting a jacket imprinted with the word “Titanic” spontaneously evolved into a sign that Pakistan was the Titanic, or possibly the iceberg). (In the same article, Friedman cautioned that an American victory in Afghanistan was possible only if the US recognized that “Dorothy, this ain’t Kansas.”)
Then, of course, there’s the fact that he is certifiably wrong on a regular basis. (“There is never going to be any European monetary union,” he wrote on October 4, 1995, a little more than three years before the launch of the euro. “Forget it. Buy German marks. They’re all you’ll ever need.”) And yet, thanks to his relentless service as a mouthpiece for US empire and capital, he’s permitted to continue churning out his pseudo-thoughts week after week—even if, as he inexplicably joked in his 2005 ode to corporate globalization The World Is Flat, “some of my readers wish my column could be shipped off to North Korea.” READ MORE AT FAIR.