Shows you what they know

Forbes magazine has its list of the 25 most influential liberals.  They are, in reverse order:  Michael Pollan, Kurt Andersen, Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, James Fallows, Gerald Seib, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Hendrik Hertzberg, Matthew Yglesias, Maureen Dowd, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Moyers, Chris Matthews, Fareed Zakaria, Markos Moulitsas, David Shipley, Josh Marshall, Rachel Maddow, Oprah Winfrey, Jon Stewart, Tom Friedman, Fred Hiatt, Arianna Huffington, Paul Krugman.

Egads, Sullivan, Dowd, Hitchens, Matthews, Friedman and Hiatt aren't even liberals.  Sullivan is a Reaganite and Hitchens a trotskyite-turned-Bush supporter.  Dowd is just odd.  I rarely know what her point is, and, to the extent I do, it seems whacked.  Friedman and Hiatt have neo-con tendencies.

I don't think of James Fallows as being particularly liberal.  He often reports on topics such as journalism, or, most recently, China, and does so with minimal ideological overlay.  Fareed Zakaria is the same way, although in Zakaria's case, if anything, he seemed to come off more as a moderate conservative.  Michael Pollan, the food guy, also seems non-ideological to me, as does, really, Oprah Winfrey.  She's probably a liberal, but she's not influential as a liberal. 

Of Forbes' 25 most influential liberals, I rule out 10 right off the bat as either not liberals or not influential as liberals. Of the remaining 15, Markos and Arianna were once Reagan Republicans, and Kos is now calling himself a libertarian.  (I don't know anything about Kurt Andersen or David Shipley, but let's go ahead and give Forbes the benefit of the doubt and call them influential liberals.) 

Of the remainder, I would agree that Drum, Klein, Seib, Greenwald, Hertzberg, Yglesias, Moyers, Marshall, Maddow, Stewart, and Krugman should be on the list.  Of those 11, it should be noted, five--Drum, Klein, Greenwald, Yglesias, and Marshall--are bloggers.  Seib and Hertzberg are both in journalism--the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker, respectively.  The pastor-journalist-now sage Bill Moyers definitely belongs on the list, as does Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laurete and a columnist at the New York Times. 

Comments

[Hypatia]

Zakaria is a textbook example of the new definition of liberal as “conservative but not totally whacked out.”