A new conservative columnist at the New York Times – former Wall Street Journal writer Bret Stephens – is under fire from co-workers even before he's written a single word for the newspaper.
Declan Walsh, the Times's Cairo bureau chief, and the Times' Interpreter columnist Max Fisher both criticized Stephens for a column he wrote last summer about anti-Semitism in Arab countries.
The Stephens column also criticized a New York Times Magazine article — "the story of the catastrophe that has fractured the Arab world since the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago" — for not focusing on what he views as the important role anti-Semitism has played.
Stephens also was blasted by ThinkProgress and called a "faux-conservative" by the Conservative Review.
"What's clear is that everything Stephens writes for the Times, particularly at the outset, will be picked apart by an audience (including some co-workers) that tends to view the world differently than he does," Washington Post "The Fix" blogger Callum Borchers wrote Monday.
Borchers noted he's not alone.
Pulitzer Prize winner William Safire's hiring in 1972 "appalled" the paper's editorial page editor, who also remarked that the hiring of conservative columnist William Kristol at the same time was a "mistake."
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