Becket Adams laments at National Review Online that “we have become a dangerously incurious people.”
In real life, we should bemoan our loss of curiosity.
You see it everywhere, most notably in politics. We saw it just last week when CBS News announced that it had hired longtime New York Times columnist Ross Douthat as a 60 Minutes contributor.
Douthat is a conservative. Besides his work at the Times, he is also a contributing editor and film critic for National Review.
He is also one of the most fair-minded people working in media today, his evenhandedness the secret of his thoughtful and insightful commentary.
But rather than asking what his specific duties at CBS will entail, the too-online types jumped immediately into anger. Rather than wait to see whether he fits the role at 60 Minutes, they embraced indignation.
“Making Ross Douthat a 60 Minutes correspondent is the least self-aware thing an opinion journalist hired to run a TV news network could do,” complained former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer.
This is harsher than anything he has ever said about the networks handing out news and opinion shows to former government mouthpieces, including George Stephanopoulos and Jen Psaki.
A headline in the Daily Beast read: “Right-Wing Religious Zealot Unveiled as New Star of ‘60 Minutes.’”
It’s little wonder that People Inc. is once again looking for someone to take the Daily Beast off its hands.
“What will Ross Douthat report upon at ‘60 Minutes’? How, very secretly, Netanyahu spends minutes of each day not killing Gaza children?” complained columnist Ted Rall. …
… This is something like the fifth or sixth CBS News-related outrage cycle since October 2025, when Bari Weiss took over as the network’s editor in chief. …
… Douthat is a fair person. He conducts thoughtful and fair interviews. He is not a firebrand. He is not a carnival barker.
He is also one of the more intellectually honest and consistently correct writers in the Times’ recent pool of columnists, his political prognostications hitting the mark more often than not.
