Word: column
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...right, so we jumped the gun a little. Last week this column predicted the imminent demise of the Free-World-leading Red Sox at the hands of none other than the Yankees and Brewers. Well, Somebody up there clearly has a bone to pick with us (it could have something to do with missing Mass last week), 'cause the locals turned right around to sweep the New Yorkers and take two of three from the bloated beer-swillers from the Great Midwest. And all you Don Zimmer fans out there had a chance to chuckle and shine up your magnetic...
...hard-working Kraft. He aspires to be as wide-ranging as Walter Lippmann once was but lacks Lippmann's rumbling, reflective authority. He gets around as Lippmann never did. Kraft can dispose of Jerry Brown one day, the Federal Reserve or neutron bomb the next, argue in another column that Carter follows "a policy of divine misguidance" (he has from the beginning condescended to Carter), then emplane to the Horn of Africa to see things for himself. Kraft talks to everybody and is well informed, but his judgments are made on the wing and are frequently undeserving of such...
...heyday of the Washington column, Lippmann embodied the word pundit. He made colossal misjudgments but never lacked audacity. As a young man, back in 1915, he defined his craft ("You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think") and admonished political writers: "The truth is you're afraid to be wrong. And so you put on these airs and use these established phrases ... You cannot be right by holding your breath and taking precautions...
Other editors feel bound to run a writer's column completely or not at all, but they too pick and choose. "You get a little flak from older readers who want to read the same columnists every time," says Edwin Guthman, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, "but we pick the four best things every day. One of the problems is that so many write about the same thing." Adds Anthony Day, editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times: "We go by interest and topicality, not by name...
...editors don't think that any Washington columnist, no matter how energetic and wise, can be knowledgeable and reflective on important matters three times a week. So for their Op-Ed pages, editors now look around for speeches or articles by specialists to cover many subjects. "The Washington column is over the hill a little bit," the Chicago Tribune's editor Clayton Kirkpatrick believes. "The world is more complex, the issues are more varied. Mark Sullivan used to write fundamentally about politics, but that was before politics became so embedded in science, in economics, in sociology...