Frank Rich

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Frank Rich (born June 2, 1949 in Washington, D.C.) is a columnist for The New York Times. His column focuses on American politics and popular culture. His column ran on the front page of the Sunday arts and leisure section from 2003 to 2005; it now appears in the expanded Sunday op-ed section.

Throughout the 1980s Rich was the Times' chief theater critic. He was sometimes known as "the Butcher of Broadway" for the perceived frequency and acerbity of his negative reviews. (His review of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express, for example, noted that it was the perfect show "for the kid with everything except parents.") But Rich wasn't always negative; he championed the work of writers such as John Guare and Stephen Sondheim, and gave positive notices to otherwise critically derided shows such as Miss Saigon and Les Misérables.

His reviews have been collected in a book, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993 (ISBN 0-679-45300-8), published in 1998. One of the running themes in the book is Rich's attempt to disprove the "butcher of Broadway" mystique; he provides statistics demonstrating a dozen or more shows that he panned which racked up long runs, as well as many shows that got raves from him but couldn't stay open more than a few weeks. He published a memoir, Ghost Light (ISBN 0-375-75824-0), in 2000.

Rich authored the book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, whose fame was bolstered by a recurring endorsement on The Colbert Report following Colbert's "outrage" that Hugo Chávez had increased sales of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance to the Number 1 spot at Amazon.com, dropping Rich's book to spot 2.

Rich makes regular references to a broad range of popular culture -- including television, movies, theater, and literature -- and draws connections to politics and current events. In a January 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, he offered insights in response to the James Frey memoir scandal. On that show, he expanded on his usage in his column of the term "truthiness" (originally coined on The Colbert Report) to summarize a variety of parallel ills in culture and politics. In 2005, Rich received the George Polk Award ^[1] given annually by Long Island University to honor contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting.

Rich graduated from Harvard in 1971, where he was editorial chairman of the Harvard Crimson, studied American History and Literature, and lived in Lowell House. Before joining the Times in 1980, he was a film critic for Time magazine. He is married to Alex Witchel, who also writes for the Times, and has two sons from his previous marriage to Gail Winston. He lives in Manhattan.