I am an idiot. Everyone who writes for a newspaper is.
I don't mean to say that all columnists have diminished intellectual faculties or that we need to be tethered in place before we harm others or ourselves. I mean that the very nature of this job requires newspaper columnists to be morons.
Formulating a solid argument (one that attempts to fully understand a situation, is fair to all sides and proposes a unique solution) requires weeks of research. A standard newspaper columnist has, at best, a couple days to work. While a thorough explanation of an opinion or event requires many written pages, newspaper columnists have but a few hundred words to address, explain, theorize and defend their opinion. It's rather like reviewing a book based on the blurb on its cover.
Although the task is impossible, we need readers. In order to get them, many columnists are reduced to tricks. We generalize and are very selective of the information we choose to pass on -- all in the hope of convincing you.
Some columnists play it safe by writing fluff, conducting unsubstantiated attacks on well-known public figures or events or (the worst of the three) telling you what they did that weekend. These tricks, however, are only ways of avoiding the impossible: formulating a convincing argument without having the benefit of substance.
At The State Press, we have 600 to 800 words to do this. That's it. If you are ever convinced by someone's opinion based on what is a summary, you are either reading a highly prolific writer or you too are an idiot.
I have written for this paper off and on for four semesters, in which time I have written my share of fairly good columns and ones not so good. I've worked with both highly talented and extremely poor writers. Yet, through it all there has been but one immutable fact: garbage does get published.
Every paper is teaming with garbage, yet you continue to read them. You continue to get your information from us. It is this last part that should scare you most. The only thing worse than being uninformed is being half-informed, because half-informed individuals think they know what they're talking about and may even convince others, creating an army of partially informed idiots.
Your first clue should have been that hype is the columnist's primary tool. How often have we convinced you that something we wrote about is posing an immediate danger to you or your family, only to invent a new threat the very next day?
How often have we demonized an individual, an agency or group so that you too feel righteous anger over their actions, despite the fact that you don't really know their story?
The signs have always been there. We display them readily, but years of feeding information to the reading public has made most of you complacent enough to accept whatever we say, without so much as an inkling to seek out more complete sources of information.
If done properly, this job can be exceedingly difficult. Writing a fair, convincing column that proves a good point requires the sacrifice of biting controversy and entertainment: the things that truly keep you reading.
The truth of the matter is that readers love to overwhelmingly approve or vehemently contest our unsubstantiated prose. Readers love short unconvincing articles. In this way, you're guaranteed to have sufficient grounds to disagree with us. In this way you can legitimately call us what we are forced to be: idiots.
Joshua Billar is a chemical engineering graduate. Reach him at joshua.billar@asu.edu.
