Why the Washington Post Op-Ed Page Is So Dull
By Colman McCarthy
Newspaper op-ed pages, it can be theorized without too much cynicism, are read by people who believe other people are reading them—so you’d better, too, if you want to be in the know. In the nation’s capital, readers who turn to the daily op-ed page of The Washington Post thinking that hordes of others are devouring the columns may be dabbling in overly broad assumptions.
Because the opinion page of The Post is a scene of numbing sameness: centrist or rightwing viewpoints, listless writing and pro-establishment megaphonics Most of it is produced by ensconced white males day after repetitive day, week after stodgy week. It is a wasted resource. For readers with a yen for a diversity of views or—not to be intellectually greedy—a desire for the off-beat, daring, boat-rocking or witty, The Post’s op-ed page is not the place to look. While other parts of the paper shine—the investigative reporting of Sari Horwitz, TV critic Tom Shales, Book World, Mary McGrory, the obituary writing of Claudia Levy and Adam Bernstein, legwork Metro columnists Courtland Milloy and Marc Fisher--—torpor marks the op-ed page.
The one measurement for a quality op-ed page is for readers to turn to it with no guess about who will be there or what will be said. This means a daily offering of unpredictable diversity in both writers and topics ranging from right wing, left wing and the whole bird.
This is the trend nationally. Lynnell Burkett, editorial page editor of the San Antonio Express News and an officer of the National Conference of Editorial Writers (NCEW), believes that “if you expect people to read your op-ed page it has to reflect the variety of voices in the community. That means gender diversity, ethnic diversity, and a wide variety of political views.”
Fred Fiske, NCEW president and senior editorial writer of The Syracuse Post-Standard, agrees: ‘‘In these days when newspaper resources are circumscribed by tight budgets, when editors face even greater constraints on their time because of technology chores and a staffing crunch, the course of least resistance might be to rely more on syndicates and other pre-packaged commentary, to give voice mainly to regular contributors…Seeking out new voices, welcoming ever-more diversity and taking risks with provocative and controversial writers can consume time we don’t have and not always produce results. But that’s the envelope editorial pages should be pushing. It’s a way to lead the community’s conversation in new and exciting directions.”
The directions taken by The Washington Post’s op-ed page are old and unexciting. In a recent three month span—May, June and July 2001—424 columns appeared. Only 26 were by women. In May, five women were given space in nine out of 141 columns. June had 21 days of op-eds exclusively by males. July saw 11 days with a female byline, except that three were co-written with men. The Post buys the columns of several women—Ellen Goodman, Molly Ivins, Geneva Overholser—but they are mostly ignored. In 92 days, Goodman ran four times, Ivins once and Overholser not at all. Blacks and Hispanics were equally shorted: beyond The Post’s two in-house black op-ed columnists, minorities from outside the fold were only occasionally seen.
Among the nation’s major dailies, The Post has the most locked-in op-ed page. Like a Capitol Hill restaurant catering to elite regulars, space is automatically reserved for a few management favorites. Most Sundays, the menu is David Broder, Jim Hoagland, David Ignatius and George Will. One slot is filled by an outsider. During the 13 Sundays of May, June and July when 62 columns ran, 44 went to the Favored Four. Among the remaining 18, two were blacks—one the secretary of education, the other from the New America Foundation. None were women or Hispanic.
From Monday through Saturday, other regulars dominate: Robert Novak, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Kelly, Robert Samuelson, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Richard Cohen, Michael Kinsley, William Raspberry, Colbert King,. Not one is on the Left. After these are given their say—regardless of whether or not it is compelling--The Post’s op-ed page becomes a bulletin board for establishment heavies whose columns read like memos shared among the good old boys. Once again, Rightists and Centrists dominated during the three month period: Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Alexander Haig, Zbigniew Brezinski, R. James Woolsey, William Bennett, William Kristol, Robert Bork, Robert Kagan, Colin Powell, Samuel Berger, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Bill Gates Sr., assorted formers--former assistant secretaries, former senators, former White House press aides—and last but definitely least, think tankers.
Only rarely were these ranks broken by anyone from the Left: Rep. John Lewis, Robert Borosage, a nun tortured in Guatemala, the advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, and a scattered few others. Fifty or so rightwingers to every Lefty: that’s balance.
If diversity is limited among the Post’s opinion writers, so also are topics. Nothing was written about Vieques. Nothing on the wars in Africa. Nothing on conditions in U.S. prisons. Nothing on corporate wrongdoing. Nothing on U.S. arms sales abroad. Nothing on the nation’s number one health problem, heart disease. Nothing on domestic violence, the leading cause of injury among American women. Nothing on the effects of alleged welfare reform on poor people. Nothing on the death toll in Iraq due to economic sanctions. Nothing on health and safety issues affecting workers. Nothing on the poverty of Native Americans or their current trust fund lawsuit against the federal government.
This selectivity brings to mind “The Sound You Hear Is Silence” by Morton Mintz in the Nieman Reports magazine, Summer 2000. Based on queries to 124 editorial writers, columnists and commentators on what they said about corporate crime or misconduct in the previous decade, and with 15 per cent replying, Mintz concluded: “Years after year after year, leading mainstream opinion-shapers shun the subject. Moreover, they generally prefer not to admit the shunning. It’s fleedom of the press….It’s a rare day in 3,650 days when the national media expose Americans to opinions on corporate wrongdoing.”
Should doubts persist about Post favoritism, there is the monthly Henry Kissinger column. The former warlord, now the president of Kissinger Associates, is given as much as 40 to 50 percent of the op-ed page to instruct those of lesser intelligence—i.e., the public-- on how to keep America mighty. At 2,000-plus words a column, no Post editor dares suggest to The Great One that a paragraph here and there needs chopping. Sleuthing by a PI isn’t needed to learn how this platform has been given to Kissinger. He has long been a Martha’s Vineyard houseguest pal of Katharine Graham, the late publisher at whose July funeral he mounted the National Cathedral pulpit to bid farewell. It isn’t a mystery why The Post chooses to run it’s editorial and op-ed pages as it does. Graham, the daughter of a lifelong Republican who denounced President Franklin Roosevelt’s fiscal policies as irresponsible, wrote in her memoir, “I was and am a centrist.”
Such a claim is customarily put forward to create an image of impartiality, that one is agenda free. Yet centrists are as prone to biases as anyone else. In Graham’s case, the biases were reflected in the Post’s editorials. In the1980s and ‘90s, the paper supported aid to the contras, the nomination of Edwin Meese to be attorney general, NAFTA, U.S. military bombings in Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Supporters of those issues could rally left-of-center undecideds by saying, “imagine that, the Post is on our side,” when the reality was, “Naturally the Post is on our side.”
Editorially, the Post tacks left only on the safe liberal issues. It opposes the death penalty, it punches Big Tobacco and the NRA. It favors civil liberties, AIDS research, curbing dogs in Georgetown and similar toughies. Since the editorials during the Watergate heydays—the gritty writing by Roger Wilkins that was overseen by then editor Philip Geyelin--The Post has rarely found an editorial limb it dares go far out on.
In 1977, Katharine Graham explained her centrism: “Papers that want to serve and keep their readership cannot afford to be eccentric or extreme. As Walter Lippman once remarked to me, a newspaper may be a little to the left of its community, or a little to the right, but it cannot move too far from the center of opinion without alienating its audience and losing readers of the paper—or the editorial page.”
This proclamation came near the time that the Post became publicly traded. Shares sold for under $20. Post stock is now close to $600 a share, the second richest after Berkshire Hathaway, the corporation of Graham financial mentor, Warren Buffett. It also came shortly before Graham fired Geyelin, an openminded editor who kept the op-ed page available to voices from all sides.
During the 1980s and 90s, the Post’s tightly controlled op-ed page mirrored the leanings of Katharine Graham: be cautious about eccentrics and extremists but print the rightwing Novaks, Wills and Krauthammers, and embrace the Kissingers and other insiders of power and propriety. For those two decades, Meg Greenfield, a confidant and salon companion of Katharine Graham, ran the paper’s op-ed page—or what she liked to call the choicest piece of “real estate” in Washington. As landlord, she showcased herself by habitually reprinting her own biweekly Newsweek column at the top of the page. An intellectualizing neo-con given over to Deep Pondering, her slant on things was displayed in Roger Wilkin’s autobiography, A Man’s Life. Shortly after Wilkins joined the Post in 1971 to write editorials, he was having lunch with Greenfield, then deputy editor of the editorial page, and told her he “was beginning to explore the women’s movement. I asked Meg about it. ‘I don’t know much,’ she said. ‘I’m like you. I’ve never been a ‘cause’ person.’ That was either a serious misreading of me or Meg was gently instructing me in the preferred approach to the work at hand. Other things she mentioned at other times confirmed the latter suspicion. High passions were tolerable foibles in minor associates, but not appropriate for more serious members of the staff, the principal shapers of the Post’s opinions.” Editorially, Wilkins concluded, the paper was “drifting right.” Two years later, he went to The New York Times.
The current overseer of the Post op-ed page is editorial page editor Fred Hiatt. In his mid-40s, and raised in Brookline, Mass., he came to the paper in 1981. After covering the Pentagon and writing from Japan and Moscow, Hiatt was brought to the editorial and op-ed pages by Greenfield in 1996. When publisher Donald Graham installed Hiatt four months after Greenfield’s 1999 death, he dashed anyone’s hopes that diversity, liveliness and unpredictability might be found on the op-ed page: “Fred’s journalistic values and standards are of the same type as Meg Greenfield’s, and that’s the best type there is….Post editorial policy is not going to change.”
So tethered, Hiatt—as a personal acquaintance and one-time colleague, I admire him for his innate modesty and friendliness—has indeed not become a changer. Not yet, anyway. In mid-August, I wrote to him saying I was preparing this article and would be glad to have his thoughts. He replied in a letter saying, “I agree that the page should strive for diversity of viewpoint and subject matter. I’m working on it.”
Boldness will be needed. It can only be speculated how much Hiatt will try for, knowing that he was appointed, not elected, to his job, and that the appointer has already commanded no changes.
To free up the Post’s op-ed page would mean, first, telling all the regular columnists that their days of privileged regularity are over. Space is not guaranteed. As horrendously difficult as it may be for the nation’s capitol to get through a Sunday without the thoughts of Broder, Hoagland, Ignatius and Will, or Mondays and Thursdays without Novak, or Fridays without Krauthammer, or a month without Kagan or Kissinger, and as stubbed as the toes of all these Big Foots may be to have their monopoly ended, the pleasure of the readers would come before the entitlements of the writers. Access to the page would be earned by merit, not guarantee. If the Post believes that Molly Ivins and her trenchancy and colorful language rate an appearance only once in three months, or Ellen Goodman once every three weeks, then by that standard such medicores as Raspberry, Kelly, Cohen, Samuelson, et al., should be printed once every three years—or 30.
To find replacements—the new and diverse voices that Fred Fiske spoke of—isn’t a challenge beyond the competency of a large big city daily. The country brims with writers—both professionals and amateurs—who could bring zest to the Post’s op-ed page, as they do to other pages in both large and small markets.
Until that happens, the assessment of Laird Anderson—emeritus professor of journalism at American University who taught opinion writing for more than 20 years after reporting for the Wall Street Journal—must be weighed: “The Post’s op-ed page is a huge disappointment to those of us who cherish the craft of opinion writing. The mix of columnists and their views is thoroughly predictable. I see little innovation in reaching out to writers—and there are literally hundreds of them in this town—who could lighten up the landscape of commentary. The page is dull. But because it has little competition and, in my view, because it panders to pedestrian opinion-makers in government and politics, the page will remain bland and largely uninteresting.”
Anderson was one of many Post readers—including several who work at the paper--whose sentiments I sought. After a time, I stopped asking. The opinions, like the op-ed page itself, were predictable.
Colman McCarthy, who wrote editorials for The Washington Post from 1969 to 1978, and columns from 1969 to 1997, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington. His next book is I’d Rather Teach Peace: the Class of Nonviolence.