The New York Times provoked a little bit of controversy a few weeks ago when it announced that William Kristol would become a weekly opinion columnist for the newspaper. (Clark Hoyt, the newspaper's "public editor," received nearly 700 messages about the Kristol selection -- and only one praised the choice.)

In an effort to defend the decision, the editorial -page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, said critics of the move were displaying a "weird fear of opposing views."

But according to Stephen M. Walt, hiring Kristol did not in fact bring "opposing views" to the New York Times op-ed page, much less the mainstream media. Instead, if the newspaper really wanted to introduce a new viewpoint into the American political discourse, it should have hired a realist -- someone, well, like Walt.

"Such views are hardly heretical, but there is not a single major columnist, TV commentator, or radio pundit who consistently presents a realist perspective on world politics and American foreign policy," Walt writes in a column for Salon. "In America today, the mainstream media is a realism-free zone."

Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government (and no stranger to controversy himself), makes the case that realists are an important constituency in academe with an "impressive" track record as guides to foreign policy and would provide "a valuable antidote to the self-righteous hubris that pervades contemporary U.S. commentary on foreign affairs."

Walt never poses the question of why realists are largely absent from newspaper opinion sections. Gideon Rachman does, and he offers a very succinct answer: "The neocon worldview makes for interesting journalism, and the realist one doesn't." 

"Neocons tend to deal in big ideas and sweeping trends  -- the advance of freedom and democracy, for example. This makes for very readable journalism," writes Rachman, foreign-affairs columnist for the Financial Times.

And Rachman has some advice for Walt: "Stop whinging and come to terms with one of the unspoken, unfortunate mottos of journalism -- 'It doesn't matter if you are right, just be interesting.'"