American Spectator Magazine

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 1:57pm on Friday, August 14th, 2009

Ben Stein was fired as a business columnist for the New York Times in August 2009. The Times cited his work as a pitchman for a credit score web site, saying this violated Times ethics guidelines.

Stein wrote about the experience at The American Spectator on August 10, 2009:

"...in the time I had been doing my column, roughly five or six years, I had done many commercials for goods and services. No one at the Times ever said a word negatively about these. In fact, when I did a series of commercials with Shaquille O'Neal, the legendary basketball star, one of my superiors at the Times asked me for souvenirs. No one ever told me in any way, by word, look, or gesture, not to do commercials.

Meanwhile, the haters connected with atheism and neo-Darwinism continued to attack me.

Then, two things happened to change and end my career at the Times. Well, maybe three. The Times told me they were forced by budgetary pressures to only run me every four weeks. This was a blow and I started to think about where else I might write. (I had been solicited by many major publications while at the Times but my editors had asked me not to write for them and I did as asked.)

But the two main things, as I see them, were that I started criticizing Mr. Obama quite sharply over his policies and practices. I had tried to do this before over the firing of Rick Wagoner from the Chairmanship of GM. My column had questioned whether there was a legal basis for the firing by the government, what law allowed or authorized the federal government to fire the head of what was then a private company, and just where the Obama administration thought their limits were, if anywhere. This column was flat out nixed by my editors at the Times because in their opinion Mr. Obama inherently had such powers."

The full story:
http://spectator.org/archives/2009/08/10/expelled-from-the-new-york-tim/