Making us squirm is a columnist’s job
Readers have opinions about Star columnists.
Recent columns on race and diversity, getting Ontario students back in the classroom and the Blue Jays’ season have sparked the ire of readers. There was criticism that a column on the political woes of Finance Minister Bill Morneau was too harsh on the Liberal government.
One reader demanded that columnists be banished from the front page entirely, declaring, “The Star has yet to decide if it is a newspaper or an opinion platform.”
Well, the Star has long performed both roles, with a strong stable of columnists providing analysis to accompany the news. When readers fly to their keyboards to write angry denunciations of those opinions, the public editor has defended the right of columnists to speak their minds.
After all, a columnist is not meant to be a dispassionate, even-handed chronicler of the news. Their very job is to take a side, to provoke and prod us to see an issue from a different vantage point. That’s why the Star is careful to label them as opinion.
A columnist’s viewpoint may not always be popular in the newsroom. The tone can occasionally make a public editor cringe. But the Torstar Journalistic Standards Guide states that “opinion journalists have wide latitude to express their own views.”
As my predecessors have noted, that even extends to the right to be outrageous when making a point. Of course, that doesn’t mean they have to be. I have some sympathy with readers who say they don’t want to be insulted for holding opposing viewpoints. “I don’t want to be berated with my morning coffee and toast,” one reader wrote.
Yet, in holding civic institutions to account, calling out politicians and stirring us all to act, blunt talk is often the best tool a columnist can wield. We’ve seen that with the recent discussions around race, racism and diversity, to break through the status quo and jar people into recognizing long-standing biases and inequities.
At the forefront of that topic has been Shree Paradkar, who writes on race and gender for the Star. Paradkar says she sets out to be thoughtprovoking rather than provocative.
“I’m just trying to be as clear as I can … if that clarity ends up provoking people, it’s not by design,” she said. “My hope is that it makes you see how the invisible hierarchies operate in our society.
“Who is being provoked and what are they being provoked to think of? I think those are two very important issues,” she said.
Without the wide latitude she enjoys as a columnist, “I could not do my job,” she told me.
Yet she notes that the “opinion” label can be a misnomer. Most columnists like Paradkar remain reporters at heart and their columns blend news, analysis and opinion. Paradkar says her goal is to draw on data “to just not make it about my opinion but to ground it in analysis.”
No doubt, Paradkar’s columns spark reader feedback, notably one on the hordes who crowded into Trinity-Bellwoods Park and another that took aim at “feel-good white saviourism.”
Unlike other columnists, whose focus might be politicians or pro athletes, Paradkar’s gender and race focus means she is writing about attitudes found in society at large. Her unflinching writing hits closer to home.
“If a journalist’s job is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, the question is, ‘Who is the comfortable?’ For many beats, those could be corporate hotshots or political leaders. In my gender and race focus, those comfortable are us. We like sticking it to the man but don’t like the same scrutiny on ourselves. And it shows,” she said.
Some readers don’t always like her message. Yet the long-standing attitudes and problems she writes on won’t get resolved without attention and action. As one reader wrote her, “thank you for regularly making me feel uncomfortable and making me re-examine my assumptions, beliefs and opinions.”
Veteran columnist Rosie DiManno prompted a few emails when she wrote that the “chattering commentariat” had been transformed into a “platoon of brownshirts” at the potential health risks of having the Blue Jays play in Toronto.
Brownshirts is the name given to Nazi Stormtroopers whose terror tactics aided Adolf Hitler in his rise to power. A harsh analogy, no doubt. Reader Allen Tait wrote to say he took “great offence.”
“Heathy respectful debate is important,” he said in an email. “Analysis supporting opinion should not include offensive and insulting references to individuals who hold an opinion contrary to the columnist.”
DiManno says it was a metaphor. “My view is that we shouldn’t be afraid of words, certainly not allow public reaction to strip our vocabulary because someone takes offence,” she told me.
Columnists can make us squirm with their language and rage at their viewpoints. That is, after all, part of their job description. Bruce Campion-Smith