How We Rein In the Clown Show
Former ‘New York Times’ columnist Frank Rich wants the media to do a better job holding Trump to task during the coronavirus pandemic
Frank Rich spent more than 30 years at the New York Times, first as chief theater critic and later as an opinion columnist. Then, as now, he had an elegant, velvety way with a sentence, a darkly fizzing sense of humor, and an abiding mistrust of power. Even today, it’s a pleasure to turn back to his columns on the Arab Spring or the 2009 bailout.
If you’re not old enough to remember Rich’s years at the Times, you might know him as the Emmy-winning executive producer of the HBO series Veep and Succession. Or as the grand seigneur of New York magazine, where his long, discursive pieces make sense of our politics and culture. At 70, he is still prolific, and his ability to hold a mirror up to our society’s ugliest blemishes — whether through journalism or satire — remains unmatched.
The bedrock of Rich’s journalistic method has been, for more than four decades, “to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage,” as he wrote in his farewell to Times readers in 2011. But under the deepening shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, he spoke with GEN from his home in New York City about the need for…
