About Ben Stein
August 8, 2009Jon Brooks Comments OffLots of user commentary today about the New York Times dropping Ben Stein’s Sunday business column due to his advertising work for FreeScore.com. The blogs are humming, and an extremely unscientific 
sampling finds a good deal of schadenfreude about the axing. (Though to be fair, if you had to actually pick one quality that most describes the blogosphere on any topic, it just might be schadenfreude. Who among us, sneering at our keyboards, hasn’t tapped out a jubilant LOL! at the misfortune of a disliked individual?) Stein nemesis Felix Salmon indulges in a celebratory post on his Reuters blog, calling Stein, in a parting shot, the “world’s worst financial columnist.” Over at The Reaction, Capt. Fogg writes:
I have to say I loathe Ben Stein, so I was pleased to hear that The New York Times has fired him for conflict of interest. Dispensing financial advice from the Sunday Business Section while being a spokesman for Freescore.com, which offers free monthly credit reports for only $359, seems reason enough, but of course there was the financial advice itself. Ben gets his prognostications from the same source on Neptune that Jim Cramer does…
At The Big Picture business blog, a post titled “Good riddance Ben Stein” reads:
The commentary he produced at the Times was amongst the most irresponsible, poorly researched, and just goddammed wrong stuff ever to grace the business pages of the Grey Lady.
As I previously whined 18 months ago, “we’ve reached the point where Stein’s commentary has become detached from reality, so ridiculously fabricated, that it can no longer be read. Indeed, its become so absurd that not only have I decided to skip reading him, I am immediately making the public commitment to stop commenting on his Tom Foolery.”
Of course, not everyone is shouting hallelujahs over the Stein decline. (The man does have over 4,800 fans on Facebook, after all.) A post at geeeeeZ! laments:
Something’s weird……..maybe I’m not getting the implications…or I hope I’m not. I’ll bet it’s not because Stein’s conservative, right? (ya, right)
A like-minded reply reads: “Y’know, pretty soon they’re gonna start rounding up the conservatives and sending us to re-education camps and making us wear little gold elephants on our pinstriped pajamas.”
And over at Yahoo! Buzz, where an article on the Stein firing is the 5th-most “buzzed up” item, more conservatives are voicing their displeasure with the Times’ decision. A typical post:
Ben, you are an independent thinker speaking about your views as an true American freedom fighter. You are an intellectual that understands our founding principles. Thank you for thinking outside of the political box many NYT readers are in. “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. “-Thomas Jefferson
You can still read Stein, if so inclined, in the conservative American Spectator.
