Self-cancellation
I’ve been writing a newspaper column off and on since 1984, the year Bari Weiss was born. That was the year I started writing a three-day-a-week front-page column for The Shreveport Journal called Piney Woods Journal. The premise was to travel all over what is called the Ark-La-Tex, find stories and write about them.
I didn’t deserve that column. Like most beginning columnists, it was gifted to me. A great editor, Stan Tiner, had the idea for it, and he guessed that his cop reporter could do it. I had a decent car and they reimbursed me for gas. My territory was defined by how far I could drive in a day. I visited the grave of Blind Lemon Jefferson in the Mount Zion Cemetery in Wortham, Texas; I wrote about the suicide of Doc Hale from Little Rock.
I don’t remember much about most of those columns, but there was one that simply consisted of transcribed dialogue between a divorced dad and the preschool son he had for the afternoon as they sat parked by the side of the road watching airplanes land. That was a good one, and if someone ever digitizes the Journal archives and puts it online, I might try to find it. Otherwise, my juvenilia is probably best consigned to microfiche.
I wrote columns for the small Texas newspapers I briefly ran; when I came to Little Rock in 1989, I became part of a rota of Spectrum Weekly columnists, writing under my mug shot every second or third week. I gave it up for 14 months when I went to Phoenix to be an investigative reporter, with the understanding that when—and at that point it seemed imminent—a columnist’s job opened up, I’d be given every consideration.
But before one did, Griffin Smith came to town and told me about the intriguing new newspaper they were building back in Arkansas. And Paul Greenberg left me a phone message asking when I was going to come and write for his Perspective section. Now I’ve written this particular Sunday column for 28 years.
I thought that was a long time. Then I found out that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has a 100-year-old sportswriter, Sid Hartman, who has been writing his weekly column for more than 74 years, 10 years longer than Mike Royko was alive.
Lots of columnists hang around in the profession for a long time. Why shouldn’t they? It’s a great job. Maybe not as good as being a federal judge or a forward for FC Barcelona, but for people with few credentials and modest skills, it’s a good gig.
Some people claim it’s pretty easy; a former colleague was semi-famous for saying that it was the greatest job in the world because he could knock out his requisite 800 words before breakfast and then have the rest of the day to himself.
Which would have been a fine (if absolute demoralizing to hunt-andpeck-and-brood-about-it-me) thing to say if he actually produced sparkling copy that was a joy to read and lit up portions of readers’ brains they didn’t know were there before, but he usually didn’t.
I don’t think most of us treat the job that way, but there are a lot of hacks in the business. If you read a lot of newspaper columns you’re going to encounter a lot of cut-and-paste jobs, treacly “aw shucks” condescension, self-aggrandizement couched as humility, and sucking up to perceived power. There are far more OK colum
nists out there than good ones, and a depressingly sizable contingent of straight-up bad ones who write poorly and with exaggerated sense of their own importance.
As in every profession, there are sometimes opportunities to pursue careerist goals by moderating or amplifying—by subtly or grossly distorting—what you really think.
Because who cares what you really think anyway?
Whether a columnist is good or not has nothing to do with what political orthodoxy the public associates with them, but with the quality of their thought and the precision of its expression.
Let’s not kid ourselves, there is a performative aspect to this job and egos are engaged. I read John Brummett and Rex Nelson and often wish I’d said what they said, but while you can envy someone’s sources, intuition and/or work ethic, it’s ludicrous to attempt to impersonate another’s voice.
I’m sorry Bari Weiss resigned, because I like her voice. I find her columns interesting, if occasionally less nuanced than they might have been. The sort of political correctness she often railed against is like antifa—it genuinely exists, but most people never encounter it, and it can be thought of as an unfortunate reaction to normalized injustice.
Usually it’s just speech countering speech: I have the right to express an idea, you have a right to criticize that idea. You can advise me to shut up. But you (or the government) shouldn’t be able to make me.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t face consequences for my insistence on expressing my idea. If I say something stupid, I might expect to be called stupid (unless I really am stupid and too self-unaware to understand it). If I say something hateful, I might expect pushback, I might even get fired. If I wear my not-so super-secret White Power/Neo-Nazi lapel pin to lunch at the White House, I might … er, expect to be called “good people”?
Weiss withdrew from a situation she said she found untenable, and in doing so made public some self-serving grievances about the culture at The New York Times. While I have no idea if these claims are true or not—and they have been disputed—they don’t seem incredible to me. In a similar situation, I might have done the same thing. Who among us hasn’t imagined telling our bosses off?
No one should be bullied. But newspapers have always harbored bullies, and sometimes we venerate them and tell cocktail party stories about the atrocities they commit. Newspapers are no different than any other workplace; sometimes there is cronyism, sometimes there are nattering cliqués, always there is gossip. There is no perfect meritocracy.
Weiss obviously has other options. She will land softly enough, and her 1,500-word resignation letter can be weaponized by anyone who wants to take a whack at The New York Times. Maybe that “nest of vipers” deserves it.
But Weiss canceled herself; she gave up one of the best jobs in the world. It’s worth wondering why.