I'd like to blame it all on David Brooks, but I know it was bad before him. I read the WP daily and I have mentally trained myself to, when I see aggressively stupid headlines, look for the name below it instead of clicking it.
The values of journalism aren't up to the task of handling modern communications. Op-eds are just a particularly visible and egregious manifestation of this failing.
The same genuinely honorable journalistic impulse that led the NYT to sympathetically profile a Nazi on its news pages leads to climate deniers and Nazi-curious op-ed writers.
That honorable impulse is, of course, also shaded by some less lofty motives. Anything that gets people to cancel subscriptions costs money, and (perhaps until recently) right-wingers were more willing to cancel. And the general whiteness of newsrooms leads to a default focus on some things at the expense of others.
The values of journalism aren't up to the task of handling modern communications. Op-eds are just a particularly visible and egregious manifestation of this failing.
The same genuinely honorable journalistic impulse that led the NYT to sympathetically profile a Nazi on its news pages leads to climate deniers and Nazi-curious op-ed writers.
That honorable impulse is, of course, also shaded by some less lofty motives. Anything that gets people to cancel subscriptions costs money, and (perhaps until recently) right-wingers were more willing to cancel. And the general whiteness of newsrooms leads to a default focus on some things at the expense of others.
But what really pisses me off is when people double-post. This must be stopped!
Speaking of the other place, at what point are you all going to get with the program and delete your accounts?
Contrarianism is a terrible thing. Like, both the Times and the Post deliberately hire people who are going to 'challenge' what they think of as the consensus among their reasonably sane and well-educated readers. And, while there's nothing wrong with challenging, if you start with consensus among reasonably sane and well-educated people, and you're required to find things to disagree with? You're going to end up with a lot of stupid crazy shit.
I'm waiting for an op-ed to convince me that step is necessary.
Other than Krugman I can't think of an op-ed piece from a newspaper that I've read in the past 15 years for anything other than hate-reading prompted by a blog post. Certainly not by an op-ed page columnist. And even withh Krugman his blog is much better than his columns.
Oh, I guess Alexandra Petri, who is legit funny sometimes.
Maybe this is Heebie's point? Bad op-eds seem like a key fuel source for the dreadful economy of takes and counter-takes that now occupy our lives.
I really want to join a "just shut up" movement, though I'm as guilty as anyone of being take-addicted. Maybe some better leaders than me can form the Just Shut Up Society.
That's nice of you to think that I have a point.
5: I feel like I can't. That the social price of deleting it is too high.
I personally haven't read an op-ed in maybe ten years. Not since I read that the NYT was making Krugman worse, rather than him making it better. That is to say, I don't even have an op-ed.
Hot take: Instead of a movement to just end the op-ed, how about a movement to replace the op-ed page with serialized Chuck Tingle books.
Right on top USA Today just published an op-ed by an Infowars columnist.
I'm not sure what purpose op-eds are supposed to serve. All that comes to mind is an article I read by a sports columnist long ago that explained that he decided to focus all his mental energy on betting on horses and just get all his political opinions from George Will. And then George Will wrote an editorial against gambling.
Pounded in the Butt by the Handsome National Debt
So handsome. Dashing.
Dreamy. The Stability Pact is just so boring sometimes.
I feel like somebody is trying to make me learn history.
purpose op-eds are supposed to serve
Johnny Carson/ Jay Leno in print. A presence definitely familiar, usually comforting, whose boring pointlessness can be plausibly denied.
I claim nothing to do with ideas or agenda, everything to do with newspaper economics and publishers' risk-aversion.
Another possible purpose -- I remember reading that the conservative readers of the Wall Street Journal liked to read Alexander Cockburn's editorials because his writing made them so angry, it was equivalent to drinking several cups of coffee.
I think there are two basic problems with op-ed pages.
First, they're a relic of the days probably more than 50 years ago now, when newspapers were the main way to get information about what's going on in the world. You'd get your facts in the news section, and you're get your expert opinion in the op-ed section, with commentary by people who genuinely knew what they were talking about both in a given field and in the journalistic and political environment, and those people would get a forum, all of which was in short supply. Today, knowing what you're talking about is a lot more common in some ways and a lot rarer in others, and literally everyone who thinks they know what they're talking about can get a forum. And yet despite all that, op-ed pages still exist and in a place of relative prominence.
Second, the presumption of airing both viewpoints. I have the sense that this is more common in America than in most of the world but am not an expert. This is leads to people trying to move the Overton Window rather than making sincere arguments, and giving complete hacks a forum when a good argument for a given position can't be found, and all the other stuff in the Vanity Fair article.
Nope. Other than a vague understanding that Sean Bean was there shooting French people and that this was followed by something like "Carlism", I'm not very knowledgeable about the period.
I can't even do centuries right. I think I'm 100 years off.
And he aged so well. I'd do it all again, honestly.
There's the problem of having a regular group of writers, who just aren't going to be able to come up with something interesting to say in 700 words twice a week for years. This is the Krugman problem, his blog is updated when he has something interesting to say, but the twice weekly columns have to be written whether or not there's something worthwhile to address. They tend to be repetitive in form and topic: "Here's what happened this week. First, some background: this is what happened before. Now this happened. Isn't it terrible?"
However, if you get rid of the regulars, you just make the second problem worse, which is you have some editor trying to find provocative stuff to drive eyeballs and discussion resulting in stupid false equivalence and unqualified hacks being given a platform. Literally- We published Erik Prince saying we should hire more of his mercenaries, and we also published Bernie Sanders! And we won't publish Richard Spencer yet, but if Nazism really got popular again we might!
The incentives are misaligned from how they were when opeds were more useful- back then you arguably were trying to change opinions and drive the discussion from a lofty, wise-man (always men) perch, which had its issues especially in relation to marginalized voices being ignored but also had some self-respect and standards. Now it's about the money which means controversy and hate reads are the way you keep your job.
I'm not sure what purpose op-eds are supposed to serve. All that comes to mind is an article I read by a sports columnist long ago that explained that he decided to focus all his mental energy on betting on horses and just get all his political opinions from George Will. And then George Will wrote an editorial against gambling.
They're apparently a relatively late development of the classic newspaper age. The NYT, at least, started its page in September 21, 1970, "to open the paper to outside voices" - literally ten days after Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs" speech. Not necessarily in direct response, but Agnew and the Nixon administration had been on a similar tack for a while at that point, it seems. And then of course in 1973 they hired William Safire, who had written that speech. It makes pretty plausible the uncited murmurings I've seen on Twitter that it was basically running defense against Nixon.
Writing good regular columns is amazingly difficult simply because you do find yourself repeating the same circles. It's even harder in a globalised age, when you can't assume background knowledge among the readers. With that said, I think that opeds are a dinosaur thing nowadays, which is to say they are mostly there to drive emotion -- hence the strapline on one particularly shitty Mail columnist - "Are you thinking what she's thinking?" - a really excellent example of Betteridge's Law, which states that the answer to any question in a headline is always "no". But the strapline does touch on one of the essential pre-social media functions of the columnist, which was to make the reader feel their opinions were important and widely shared.
Certainly, many papers in Britain have cut down on the number of regular columnists for this reason, as well as for expense. But the freelance opinion piece tends to be totally shitty. since the purpose is almost entirely to provoke a reaction, or to stage a debate. Whereas a good columnist who knows what they are talking about, say Rafael Behr or Natalie Nougayrede this week, does add something. You hire them, and they will produce well informed opinions on important -- and so by definition difficult -- questions of policy. But there are damn few of them.
Discuss the national op-eds, but if you live in a small town with a small town paper, the reader penned letters are both more frustrating and entertaining than any pro. My wife's grandfather was a serial letter-writer. He wrote about train stuff. They printed it. They were either desperate or people like train stuff way more than I do. Now it's all cray cray or "vote for Sue." Sometimes both in the same letter.
Discuss the national op-eds, but if you live in a small town with a small town paper, the reader penned letters are both more frustrating and entertaining than any pro. My wife's grandfather was a serial letter-writer. He wrote about train stuff. They printed it. They were either desperate or people like train stuff way more than I do. Now it's all cray cray or "vote for Sue." Sometimes both in the same letter.
Small towns are like academic departments in that people in both have the same combination of repeated interaction over decades with a small group of others and (mostly) small stakes.
The best thing about small town newspaper is reading the list of who got MIPed.
I think The Economist's op-eds are pretty good (is that heresy?), but The Economist is a non-standard newspaper in many ways (they insist on calling themselves a 'newspaper'). For most newspapers I agree that the op-ed is an outmoded dinosaur. They don't have to switch to freelancer-only, but they could actually recruit subject-matter experts (who have other full-time jobs) to write articles. The Vanity Fair article mentions a few of those who have written for the NYT op-ed page.
The NYT op-ed pages are still worth bashing because what they publish gets syndicated into so many other newspapers. (To the extent that newspapers are important at all these days, but that's another story.)
I was back in Baton Rouge a couple of years ago, and it struck me how little of the newspaper actually originated with that paper. (And yes, it amuses me to no end that the only daily in a place as conservative as BR shares a name with a major gay publication. I remember when it was the Morning Advocate; heck, I even remember the afternoon delivery of the State Times. Anyway, the felicitous name of the BR newspaper almost makes up for the fact that the product of the merger between the Chattanooga News and the Chattanooga Free Press is no longer called the News-Free Press. Thank you kids for staying on my lawn this long to listen to me.) Anyway, the op-eds were all NYT syndicate with a few Washington Post syndicate thrown in for diversity. I think George Effing Will was one of the diversity hires. If even a newspaper in a state capital won't run its own op-ed page, then it's worth hounding the national-level sources because their influence reaches so many other places.
Although not if that means reading David Brooks. Friends still don't let friends read David Brooks.
