Posted on 01/25/2014 7:06:00 AM PST by Kaslin
Wasn't there a time when the country had great newspapers with great editorials that regularly thundered and whispered, sighed and screamed, were outraged or outraged others? Where did they all go?
Newspapers had character in those days of yore, whether good or bad. The reader could depend on it. And the editorials were a window into their soul. Those editorials might be loved or loathed, admired or despised, but they were read. Like the newspapers themselves.
No day could start properly without at least a glance at the editorial page. Sensational or thoughtful, brief or discursive, each editorial might have a style of its own, yet they were all in keeping with the newspaper's.
It was part of an American tradition going back to Ben Franklin, John Peter Zenger and the colonial pamphleteers -- whether they were free spirits or unthinking subjects and agents of the Crown. That tradition gained momentum and power with the magnificent fulminators or just genteel reformers of the 19th century.
America once abounded in great or at least fascinating editorial pages. Particularly in these latitudes, back when the South was still the great seedbed of 20th century American literature and Mark Twain's spirit yet lived.
Those editorials might appear under the newspaper's dignified masthead, but there was no mistaking who had written them, even if the editorials went unsigned. Their prose was their signature. Whether the writer was a courageous Ralph McGill in the old Atlanta Constitution, the reliably irreverent Richard Aregood plying his trade either in Philly or Newark at the time, or both Grover C. Halls, senior and junior, at the Montgomery Advertiser in ever rambunctious Alabama.
Each had his imitators and epigones -- who in turn made their eccentricities part of their newspaper's personality. Here in Arkansas, whether he was being lauded or despised, Harry Ashmore became the voice and lightning rod of the old Arkansas Gazette in its finest hour -- the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, whose echoes still resound in this state. To its everlasting credit, the Gazette decided to speak out for the law of the land and the brotherhood of man at that juncture, not the most popular of positions back then.
Yes, there was a time when editorials said something, however debatable or just plain wrong, and said it well. Think of the late great James Jackson Kilpatrick in Richmond, my own favorite seg before he saw the light and repented of his ways, or H. L. Mencken demonstrating his verbal pyrotechnics in Baltimore while all stood back in awe.
Those were the days when every community large or small seemed to have its own, unique editor -- like the father and publisher in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," who knew every nook and cranny of little Grover's Corners, and felt every typographical error like a stab. His credo might have come from the stage directions for that play: "No curtain. No scenery."
The village editor, whatever his peculiarities, was a fixture of American society, like the village idiot. The editor played the dual roles of mentor and agitator, watchman and gadfly, philosopher and jester -- always on the lookout for a danger to spot or a lesson to draw. William Allen White of the old Emporia Gazette was the real-life personification of those multiple, ever demanding roles in a small town. "What's the matter with Kansas?" he asked in the headline of one of his many editorials that drew national attention, and deserved to. There were giants in the earth in those days, even if their towns and newspapers were scarcely gigantic. You can't hide quality, at least not on Kansas' wide-open plains.
But look around at American newspapers today and try to name a great editorial writer. Instead of a myriad of talents to choose from, the bored reader -- if he reads the editorials at all -- is likely to find himself adrift in a sea of blah. Courage seems in short supply these days on too many American editorial pages. Even its poor relation, eccentricity, grows rare. And eccentricity was once a defining part of the Southern character. What a loss it'll be when it disappears entirely, and we're all reduced to the colorless and predictable.
Who killed the great American editorial? A better way to frame the question might be to ask what killed the great American editorial. For the forces responsible for its demise are as impersonal and characterless as many of the editorials themselves. Lord save us from the On the One Hand This and On the Other Hand That school of denatured editorial writing. They're opinion pieces without the opinion. And you can spot their sense of calculation at 10 paces.
The all too typical modern editorial seems to have no discernible purpose except to avoid offending. If it does happen to express an opinion, it's only to reflect the current party line or socio-economic fashion. All the life has been drained out of it by the stultifying editorial conference, an institution which seems designed to hide any trace of an original or provocative idea. Once all those around the conference table have had their say, they wind up canceling each other out. Like a zero-sum equation. This is called consensus. And its end product is idea-free.
If somehow an original idea is conceived in such an unlikely atmosphere, rest assured it'll be stillborn. Lest it depart from the well-beaten path. The death certificate for the great American editorial might list Cause of Death as terminal neutrality. It's a common affliction as one great newspaper after another goes the way of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans or the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, either diluted beyond recognition or dead beyond resurrection. Saddest of all are those newspapers that have become only a pale shadow of their old, once vibrant selves -- dead but not yet buried.
The test of intellectual integrity in a newspaper's editorials is not whether they still hew to some political line it embraced a decade ago, or a year ago, or just a minute before, but whether the editorial column is alive and awake now, and therefore continually open to the evidence before its eyes, to the actual effect of whatever it is advocating, opposing or just appraising at the moment.
That is why George Orwell remains a model for any honest writer of opinion. Here is an Englishman who spouted all the conventional socialist pieties and prejudices and genuine passions. He not only expressed all that in the written word, in the abstract, but went off to fight side by side with the Communists in the Spanish Civil War of the '30s. Just as any good socialist in the Popular Front would. He would be wounded in that war and his cause betrayed. He was lucky to get out of Spain one step ahead of the Party's secret police, who had already jailed his comrades and were searching for him. For he had been recognized as the subversive he was, that is, a man with a mind and eyes and conscience of his own. And the honesty to express them. No totalitarian society can abide that kind of thought criminal.
Through it all Orwell, né Eric Blair, remained English to the core, an embodiment of the English character the world had come to know and respect, and now much misses. ("The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifeboat, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive." -- George Orwell, 1936) He would go on to write "Animal Farm" and "1984" and leave us a treasury of essays, book reviews and columns in English prose clear as a window pane. They still live and instruct. Reading them, you feel as if you were talking to a real person, clear-eyed and honest but, above all else, decent.
The American editorial died when its writers grew distant and professional, removed from their roots, and became only mouthpieces for a political line. Any examination of the American editorial's corpus delecti would reveal that it was bored to death, perhaps because its writer was. Much too bored to think an idea through. Ideas can be dangerous when probed. We might have to discard them or, even more trouble, follow where they lead.
Who killed the great American editorial? The fault, fellow editorial writers, lies not in our stars or in our times, but in ourselves.
You can’t make a purse out of a sow’s ear and you can’t take a food or theater critic and make him a smart political polemicist. Especially when neither seemed all that good at their original jobs.
They went to the front page. And then, along with the dinosaur media, into the dustbin.
Because of their tremendous circulation, the editors thought that people actually CARED about their editorials.
What the internet has proved is that they were mostly buying the paper for the funnies, the entertainment, the stock market prices and the ball scores. With those things now on-line, no one needs the editorials, and they never did.
Some do, some don’t. *shrug*
I’ll tell ya who ... “news entertainment” and a gazillion blogs where anyone with a cpu toss around their opinion. That’s all there is in the news industry ... opinion. And when it’s all opinion then why should an editorial matter? Quite frankly, why should pundit’s opinions matter? (they shouldn’t).
News entertainment is manipulative, propagandist dreck. And it has not only killed news reporting, it (along with it’s lesser cousin the blog “news entertainment”) has killed the editorial.
All people do anymore is sit around and go “yeah, yeah, yeah!” about the opinions of others. There is no analysis, there is no research, there is just ... yeah, dreck.
So why would anyone read an editorial when they can turn to “news entertainment” and be told what they want to hear whether or not it is true?
They were replace with stenographers writing and then reading white house script.
Editorial writers hav e been black mailed and coerced in submission. They also don’t want to end up like Breitbart or the dude who’s Mercedes was smoked by a drone.
Check out Wes Pruden at the Washington Times.
Absolutely true. I read so many news stories which are just aimed at pushing a position, persuading the reader, defending a political ideology. That's not what news stories are supposed to do. But it's the 21st century, and my front page isn't giving me facts -- it's telling me what to think.
Meanwhile, I recently saw a TV Editorial which basically said [paraphrasing]: "Obamacare could be a good thing ... or it could be a bad thing. Some people are going to like it ... and some people are going to dislike it."
Thanks so much Mr. Editor.
What’s a Newspaper?
Why, the marxist control of the MSM. is there really any question????
A friend and superb writer showed me a letter to the editor he’d written on concealed carry. The original was a marvel of compact, lucid and persuasive argument. The published letter made him sound like a lunatic. I was, at that time, selling articles to the paper and knew the editor of the editorial page. So, I asked him why they’d edited the original the way they did. In all seriousness he said, “The original was so well written, how else would the readers understand that the guy was an extremist nut case?”
Because opinions are like, well, you know the rest.
inexpensive paper used to wrap fish or to line non-discriminating parrots cages....
this is a lesson I learned early on. don’t even try to write a cogent argument in response to a leftist editorial.
they will rip you a new one with your own (severely edited)words....
The internet killed the newspaper editorial with all its blogs.
Humblegunner is working on the rest.
Funny. All that writing and they conspicuously missed the root cause: Øbozo. Øbozo is the reason why they’ve gone so milquetoast. Editorials are there to castigate and cajole, to criticize and occasionally condemn. And there’s no shortage of topics to be outraged about. But every single one of them leads straight to Øbozo’s doorstep. And the very last thing that any of them dare to do is speak ill of the ØbaMessiah.
Instead they mindlessly intoned the idiotic “Bush’s fault!” long after the pull date and focused all their energy on the internecine warfare within the pubbie party.
Now they’ve got nothing....unless one of them grows a set and calls out the monster.
I remember newspapers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.