Posted on 11/30/2024 2:41:50 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
One secret of column-writing: Offer platoons of facts that give readers the delight of discovery.
It is tempting but mistaken to say that the current administration of the universe is defective because people are not required to read op-ed columns. That thought is too adjacent to progressivism, which, a critic has said, does not care what people do as long as it is compulsory. Besides, a smaller readership can be superior to a bigger one.
Most people do not read newspapers; most who do skip the op-ed page. This means that the few, the happy few, who do read columns do so because their mental pantries are stocked with curiosity, information and opinions. So, the columnist can assume the readers’ foundation of knowledge, which enables large arguments in small spaces.
The 15th century produced what remains the most consequential communication technology ever: Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type. Glassy-eyed Americans squinting at their smartphones for videos of kittens might consider it quaint to ascribe history-shaping potency to mere print, especially during today’s digital typhoon. Media constantly clamor for Americans’ attention, which is increasingly elusive and of decreasing duration.
A newspaper column — one musty option on a rapidly expanding menu of distractions — requires reading, which, unlike passive grazing at an endless buffet of graphic distractions, is an activity. It demands one’s mental engagement. So, a column had better be pleasurable from the start, even if its subject is not pleasant. Here is Murray Kempton (1917-1997), in a column on President Dwight D. Eisenhower campaigning in Florida in 1956:
“In Miami he had walked carefully by the harsher realities, speaking some 20 feet from an airport drinking fountain labeled ‘Colored’ and saying that the condition it represented was more amenable to solution by the hearts of men than by...”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
George Will, born in 1941, is not a boomer. The oldest boomers were born in 1946.
Many of us did read the op-ed pages back in the day. But then they became unreadable. George Will being a good example of why they became so.
Ironically he was (is?) a good baseball writer. he should have gone that way.
What the print media and the MSM in general refuse to acknowledge is that they have alienated their customer base via a loss of credibility and a denial of bias. Instead they take the tack that the rubes are too ignorant to appreciate us and understand us., thereby alienating even more customers.
What a waste of a whole lot of words....
Will is a tool.
An 83-year-old is not a Boomer. They came before the Boom.
I was a big fan of this bitter atheist once. Now I would not watch his lecture if he was in my kitchen.
What a useless POS.
I kept waiting for him to get at least one base hit against the Clinton Machine - but he was throwing the game the whole time.
"Black Sox" George.
It was T-ball, and the simpering little pencil-necked jerk struck out every time.
He's a .133 hitter in political commentary.
He confused Hawthorne effect with progression to the mean.
I soon realized that he’s the world’s best columnist at being long on words, but with nothing to say—a champion for dull people who think themselves intellectuals.
When I first read Will’s columns, I thought he might be speaking in code. But I finally concluded that, no, they just were just incomprehensible.
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