This is a day I have been looking forward to for some time now.
I’m sure some of you have been looking forward to it as well. Today is the day of my last column in the Emerald. Finally.
For a little more than a year, I have faithfully engaged in the primary task of an opinion journalist: Being obnoxious for the sake of selling papers. Now, as I prepare to leave Pundit-ville – I hope forever – there is just one last group of people I want to deride: journalists.
Often, journalists come into their profession with an inflated idea of its importance. Eventually, the daily grind of human misery on which they must report turns them into cynics. They disconnect still further from the real world in order to maintain their objectivity. In the end, they’ll pat each other on the back, swap war stories and talk about all the good they did. Meanwhile, the chance of a meaningful life has passed them by. In the course of their careers, they’ve met hundreds of people who have done things worth writing about while their lot in life is merely to do the writing.
None of this would be so bad if journalists actually had an impact on people – either by informing them or helping to shape their opinions. Even this hope is often spoiled. In public opinion surveys, journalists do not score well in the trustworthiness department. Rather, they usually rank somewhere between lawyers and politicians. So most people know that journalists are full of it. No one listens. No one cares. Journalists live their lives in an echo chamber.
I always consider it a mark of great wisdom and maturity when I meet someone who doesn’t trust what the newspapers say (unless that person is wearing a tinfoil hat, of course). Journalists aren’t just reporters. They’re storytellers. In digging up news they look for a narrative thrust, a theme, a conflict. “Just the facts, ma’am” doesn’t sell papers. Moreover, “just the facts,” isn’t possible. A journalist always has to exercise news judgment to decide what’s going to be interesting to an audience. The audience demands bias in their news. Otherwise, it would be boring.
I always preferred the more objective reporting. I always tried my best to keep myself out of the story. But no matter how successful I was in keeping myself out of the story, I had to put my audience in the story. It would have been bad journalism not to think of my audience. The end result of all this, though, is that people get the news they want rather than raw, unfiltered facts.
This goes double for opinion journalism. I don’t know how I ended up as a columnist; I’m not nearly opinionated enough. I look back at what I’ve written and I see so little of myself actually reflected in my columns. Only about one-fourth of the opinion pieces I’ve written for this paper were actually built on my own opinions. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I made the rest of it up … except … that’s exactly what I did.
When I first began writing this column, my editor and I had a brief discussion about our philosophies on opinion journalism. He said it was more important to write a column that’s interesting enough for someone to read to the end than to write a column persuasive enough to actually represent my beliefs. I couldn’t have agreed more. Intellectual honesty went out the window. I decided it was more important to be controversial than to be right.
So I went on an eclectically partisan rampage: Pissing off people on the left, the right and every decent position in between. I knew I had arrived when I wrote a column that was able to both laud the Bible and piss off the religious right all at once.
In this column, I condemned terrorists who bomb abortion clinics. I got a response from such a terrorist who thought I hadn’t given his cause a sympathetic ear. I also took a cheap shot at Dr. Laura while making a serious point about some of her more ignorant critics. She responded by sending me a snippy e-mail, as well as an autographed copy of one of her books with an antagonistic inscription. I thought about sending her an autographed copy of the Emerald, but I couldn’t find a pen.
And now I come to the end of my brief contribution to the Fourth Estate. Now I’ve got to give up my audience in order to discover anew what writing means to me. Maybe I’ll start a blog. Maybe I’ll write a crappy novel. Hmm… so many cliché options.
Of course I’ve used a healthy dose of hyperbole in this column. Journalists occasionally make valuable contributions. One example is columnist Nicholas Kristof, who unrelentingly uses his New York Times column to draw attention to the underreported genocide in Darfur. So maybe journalists aren’t all bad. Still, if this column persuades just one budding journalist to go out and get a real job, I’ll know it was all worth it.
To all my readers, whether critics or fans, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Sort of.