Word: columnist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...columnist and author (Nixon Agonistes. Bare Ruined Choirs), Wills has performed an amazing job of scholarship-a total immersion in the world that gave Jefferson's mind its contours. In 1770 a fire destroyed his library and most of his papers. While other historians have tended to base their conclusions on Jefferson's later correspondence, Wills persuasively argues that Jefferson's mind was thoroughly matured by the time he was 27, the year so many of his books went up in smoke. Wills shrewdly reconstructs Jefferson's intellectual inheritance: the lan guage and assumptions with which...
...Washington press corps seems unduly hard on today's columnists ("A few are fine writers, but none are great thinkers"), harder than are the editors I've talked to around the country. But by their own new choosiness about whom and what they publish, editors are in effect recognizing, and ratifying, the decline of the Washington columnist...
Nowadays, in many major newspapers, a Washington columnist can't even count on appearing regularly. Michael Gartner, editor of the Des Moines Register, subscribes to "a passel of them" and pays but $25 a week for Kraft, $20 apiece for Broder, George F. Will and Mary McGrory. He does not always run the columns he receives and often prints only three or four of their "most important paragraphs...
Editors often have their enthusiasms-the literate George F. Will is one among newer columnists-as well as particular grievances. The vigor of a columnist's views doesn't trouble them, since with an avoidance of judgment that they call being open-minded, editors now seek for their pages a "broad spectrum" of attitudes. But they are wary of prejudicial opinions in the guise of reporting and most often cite Evans and Novak. The Los Angeles Times (whose own Washington bureau is highly regarded by the Washington press corps) dropped Evans and Novak because, in Editor...
...that the very Washington columnists who have enthusiastically chronicled the diminution of public trust in Congress and the presidency are themselves suffering from the current animus toward Washington-knows-best. More charitably, 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...