Ben Stein Fired: Expelled From NY Times Over Conflict of Interest

In an e-mail sent to me by a person I had never met nor even heard of, I was fired. (I read the e-mail while having pizza at the Seattle airport on my way to Sandpoint.) I called the editor and explained the situation. He said the problem was "the appearance" of conflict of interest. I asked how that could be when I never wrote about the subject at all. He said the real problem was that FreeScore was a major financial company and I wrote about finance. But, as I told him, FreeScore was a small Internet aggregator, not a bank or insurer.

Never mind. I was history. "You should have consulted us," was the basic line.

Of course, there was not one word of complaint when I did commercials for immense public companies. By a total coincidence, I was tossed overboard immediately after my column attacking Obama. (You can attack Obama from the left at the Times but not from the right.)

I still do not see the conflict of interest. Credit reports on the Internet never was in my subject area. However, I don't sue newspapers. And the gig was getting to be so small that it really had a minor effect on my economic life. Still, I shall miss waking up on Sunday to see my column unless a neighbor here in Beverly Hills has stolen my paper. (No place, not one place, in Sandpoint sells the Times.)

The whole subject reminds me of a conversation Bob Dylan had long ago with a reporter who asked him what he thought about how much criticism he was getting for going from acoustic to electric guitar. "There are a lot of people who have knives and forks," he said, "and they have nothing on their plates, so they have to cut something."

I will miss writing my column for the Times but I miss many things. There were some great people there, really standup people. I got to love some of them. But as to the haters and the weak willed, I think my sister and Bob Dylan had it right.