Clifford May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C., think-tank devoted to fighting terrorism and promoting democracy. A former reporter at The New York Times, Clifford was also associate editor at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. He earned his undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence, and earned dual Master’s Degrees in international affairs and journalism from Columbia. Clifford, who is fluent in Russian, blogs for National Review and for his foundation’s website.

Clifford May - From The New York Times to 9/11

I spent most of my early career in journalism at places like Newsweek and The New York Times. When I left the Times in 1990, I also left Washington, and thought I’d never come back. As I was getting older, I started having more and more opinions and realized the Times wasn’t the place for them. I was fed up with Washington, too. I went out to Denver, where I was an associate editor and columnist at the Rocky Mountain News. I had a column, radio show and TV show in Denver, doing mostly opinion journalism. Then I got pulled back in when Jim Nicholson got elected chairman of the Republican Party, and asked me to come back to Washington to be communications director.

It’s highly unusual for an alumnus of the NY Times to go to work for the Republican Party. They looked on it the way the D.A.’s office would look at an ADA who went to work for John Gotti. I did that for four years, then went to work as a public affairs consultant.

Then 9/11 happened, and a lot of people, among them Jack Kemp, Steve Forbes and Jean Kirkpatrick, wanted to put together a think tank exclusively focused on fighting terrorism and promoting democratization — with the implicit criticism that the various think tanks around town hadn’t done a good job, and that’s why we didn’t see 9/11 coming. I’ve been spending 190 percent of my time on that ever since.

Bet you can’t blog just one

I’d been writing for National Review Online for a while, and my editor, Kathryn Lopez, encouraged me to contribute blog items. It was like potato chips; once you start you can’t stop. There are ideas that just want to come out in that format. I wasn’t at the front end of this trend, but once I got into it I found it fascinating and useful.

There are many under-discussed topics in the mainstream media. Certainly anything that goes well in Iraq is going to be under-discussed. The mainstream media is every bit as much an opinion media as the blogopshere.

When I worked for the NY times it was the world’s greatest newspaper; today it’s the world’s greatest opinion paper. We have seen opinion creeping increasingly into news pieces and editorial decisions. When Arthur Schulzburger was publisher, we didn’t know very much about his opinions. Arthur Schulzburger Jr., we know his views. Abe Rosenthal was pretty good about keeping the paper within the 60 yard lines. I don’t see that today.

I think most people in the mainstream media are genuinely unaware of their bias. It’s like saying to a fish, ‘What do you know about water?’ There are so few conservatives at a place like The New York Times anymore. You can have a John Tierney as a columnist, but there’s going to be nobody in the newsroom — and if they are there, they’re going to keep their mouth shut.

On our direction

Part of what’s interesting is that Pajamas Media is trying to get a genuinely diverse group together within the same enterprise. If you look at a lot of the mainstream media, NPR and PBS for example, you don’t find a wide range of opinions. You don’t find media hospitable to those on the right.

I think it represents the beginning of the maturation of this enterprise, but I think it’s probably hazardous to predict how it will go because so much that’s come before has not been predicted. I think more and more people will be getting their news online, and for free. It will increasingly mean blogs.