Maneker on Salmon

Marion Maneker has a nice introduction to Felix Salmon in Slate. (True to its scum-sucking WaPo roots, Slate naturally neglects to give us this link to Salmon's blog.) I thought Salmon was an academic, but it seems that he is a journalist - either way, anybody who can decrease the footprint of that fake Ben Stein is a hero in my book.

It [documenting the many outrages of Ben Stein] was all harmless fun, if you consider this harmless: "Stein lives in a world," Salmon wrote in March 2009, "where flying commercial is always a chore; where few hotels are as well-appointed as his own homes; where every day he spends in a vaguely public place is a day he risks being accosted and held to account for the uncountable gallons of extremely harmful drivel that he has inflicted on his readers and viewers for years."

By his own estimate, Salmon has devoted about 35,000 words to kicking Stein. But it wasn’t until mid-July of this year that Salmon considered Stein beyond the pale. The sonorous economist had begun appearing in ads for Freescore.com, a credit-report company. "It's simply unconscionable for a newspaper of record to employ ... someone," Salmon wrote, "who is surely making a vast amount of money by luring the unsuspecting into overpaying for a financial product they should under no circumstances buy."

At first, his attack seemed to get little traction, thus proving Salmon’s claims of insignificance. "If I had any influence in the world," Salmon said to me over a late-July lunch in Midtown Manhattan, "do you think Ben Stein would still have a column in the New York Times? Seriously."

Yet barely more than a week after making that quip, the Times fired Stein for the conflict of interest. But even with his Stein trophy, there’s good reason to take Salmon at his word and assume he has little clout. He doesn’t have the massive traffic of the biggest business bloggers. He estimates he gets a few hundred thousand page views a month, hardly what the big dogs in the space like zerohedge or Barry Ritholtz are pulling. What Salmon does seem to have is a knack for getting attention.

He has a target audience in mind:

But every writer scribbles with an ideal reader in mind. Salmon is no exception. He may not covet the biggest audience but he does yearn for the best and most influential reader: "It’s a known fact," he says, "that Larry Summers reads a lot of blogs."

If that sort of audience is what he’s after, I ask, why not become a regular on CNBC? "Because Larry Summers doesn’t watch CNBC and say,'‘Oh my God, that’s interesting, I should actually think about that when conducting economic policy.’ CNBC is people shouting at each other...

Salmon's ideas are not exactly off the regular cookie press:

Here's how he handled an invitation to speak to a prestigious gathering of bankers and economists in Zermatt, Switzerland, recently: "[A]fter all the high empirical seriousness of the past couple of days, I think that the attendees enjoyed me blowing off steam by telling them that we had to do something which of course we won’t do at all: abolish the tax-deductibility of interest, move in general from a world of debt finance to a world of equity finance, and, insofar as there is credit in the world, encourage that credit to be in the form of loans rather than bonds." It was the equivalent of telling a convention of Episcopal priests that they should seriously reconsider value of the New Testament.

I think I had better add him to my blogroll.