NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 10, 2006
Ten years of this
Today is the (approximate) 10th anniversary of my employment as a columnist in the Ottawa Citizen. It is an occasion that calls for considerable self-indulgence. For ten years I have now been assuaging the more “conservative” part of this newspaper’s readership, while helping the most “liberal” readers spit up their morning coffee.I should first of all like to congratulate myself for not having quit, stormed out, uttered self-destructive ultimatums, or done the sort of thing that only gets one fired, in all this time. Ten years is the longest I’ve ever worked continuously in a single bourgeois job. It is about five times longer than my second-most-enduring weekly paycheque. This argues a remarkable maturity on my part, for it is not in my nature to suffer fools gladly. It is not even in my nature to suffer the wise. My employer has also had something to do with my survival. I was hired in the moments when Conrad Black -- still one of my heroes -- had acquired the Southam newspaper chain, and installed Neil Reynolds -- the best editor for whom I ever worked -- to turn the Citizen upside down. Neil rescued me from the obscurity of being the former editor of the former Idler magazine, as he many times recruited new voices from unusual places. But my survival has owed also to his successor, Scott Anderson, and the later owners, the Aspers and CanWest. The reader may believe that my survival has not owed to mere indifference on their part. They’ve stood up for me, when it counted, and even though they don’t agree with every word I write. But that is about them, whereas today’s column is about me, and I don’t want to drift off-topic. Suffice to say, I have many times condemned the practices and tendencies of what we now call the MSM (the “mainstream media”) in these pages. But it is worth remarking that this IS a mainstream paper, and it speaks well of the MSM that they allow themselves to be criticized from within. Looking back over a decade, I see that my little career divides in the middle, before and after Sept. 11th, 2001. I think I took my column more seriously, after the events of that day. Perhaps, I began taking everything more seriously. But gradually, too, from the cumulative effect of reader mail, I have come to realize that even a columnist in a newspaper makes a difference. It does not matter whether he is original, or profound: it matters whether he can express things that need expressing. My ambition as a columnist has not been to say anything new, though often it is to provide little-known information. My ambition has instead been to say what must be said. One of my favourite writers in this paper, Janice Kennedy, celebrating one of her own round-numbered anniversaries the other week, warned readers who flinch at the first-person singular, to avert their eyes. No long-term reader of mine could possibly be offended by my own inclination to be, where the circumstances demand, entirely personal. (And the circumstances demand this almost every day.) It is the sort of thing for which I have got out of the habit of making apologies. I think the reader needs to know who is talking to him. He can accept or reject what we (sorry, I) have to say, since he is a person himself. (Or herself, in some cases.) I think more is lost, including much honesty and most candour, when a writer is able to hide behind the authority of an institution. The pretence of “objectivity” where no such thing is possible is among the worst conceits of the MSM. The writer simply suppresses information that would reveal his stake in the subject he discusses. Full anonymity would be another thing -- a different arrangement, requiring a different set of rules -- but in today’s press, there are by-lines everywhere. They ought to be put to good use. More deeply, I believe both Plato and Aristotle agreed that philosophy is ultimately personal. It was the great revelation of the Founder of Christendom, that everything is ultimately personal, too. (That would include the political in the personal, and not vice versa.) Everything comes down, on the day of judgement, not merely to what we said, but how we said it, and finally, what we are. Hah! My dear reader. You thought I’d try to sneak religion into this somehow, and you are not disappointed. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top