The rate of mutation and disintegration in the world of opinion writing is bewildering. I’ve aspired to "opinion journalism" since I was child, as a profession and a kind of identity, as a hobby and a pastime, a bullhorn and a therapy. It always appeared to me to be one of the basic ways to get and test some knowledge, but opinion journalism is dissipating at an ever-more rapid rate.
I have trouble unthinking all its categories: the distinctions of columnist and guest contributor, for example, or between the opinion of the publication itself (as represented on the editorial page) and of the opinionated people it employs to state their strong opinions independently (on the op-ed page, the page opposite the editorial page). I didn't realize how fundamental all that was in my head until it all started to go blooey. The process has taken some 20 years or more, but now appears terminal, because it has come for The Washington Post.
I got the notion of wanting to "write opinion" sitting around my parents' table in Washington DC in the early-1970s as they and my brothers drank coffee and passed around and yelled about The Washington Post op-ed page every morning. It featured columnists such as Carl Rowan and James J. Kilpatrick, Wiliam Raspberry and George F. Will. Will made my mother mad. These same columnists would often battle it out on television shows such as Agronsky and Company, which flickered each week in the living room.
DC buzzed with their opinions, and all the nation buzzed with DC's. I started thinking early that this was something I’d like to do. For one thing, writing a clean, convincing or provocative op-ed column was the kind of accomplishment my parents could recognize.
The form of the page and the piece were restrictive back then, and I spent time mastering a form that hardly exists anymore: the 750-word quick-hitter, there-and-back-again op-ed column. Three or four of them would appear each day on each paper's op-ed page, often along with a cartoon or some sort of image. Little photos of the columnists might accompany their contributions, and Kilpatrick's humorous scowl or Raspberry's bold Afro were persistent characters around the house.
Will has spent 50 years doing this, and the typical good op-ed columnist wrote two columns a week for decades on end: hundreds of items on any issue they took a mind to opine about. They developed a voice in their cities, and then, through "syndication," often well beyond it. The Post's op-ed writers could be found in papers all over the country.
Eventually, I wrote hundreds of op-ed pieces for the Nashville Banner, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Los Angeles Times, and many others, was distributed for some years by Creators Syndicate, and I’ve written weekly for a nine years for Splice Today. But the genre, the form, is ceasing to exist. Maybe the classical op-ed column now is like the sonnet: a writer might revisit it for fun, but it can only be a sort of historical reenactment. The death of the novel is often proclaimed. The death of the op-ed column is happening before our eyes.
A fundamental change came around 2000, when papers stopped thinking of their online operations as mere appendages to paper, or ways of representing on a screen the paper they were already publishing. As soon as the online version became somewhat autonomous, it began placing new demands and opening new possibilities. Length mattered less and less.
In 1995, an editor was likely to comb through every word and get me down to 650 so she could fit something else in. But by 2005 I was sending 1500- or 2000-word pieces to opinion editors, the kind of things that could only previously have appeared in a Sunday supplement.
Many publications were publishing a lot of content and paying very little (less and less) for it. The form sprawled; the beautifully-crafted op-ed column (though you can still read them from Will!) stopped mattering. Pretty soon, the styles of newspaper (or news site) opinion writing began imitating and emulating forms of online expression, a process that has continued ever since.
The loss of form in the column corresponded to the rise of the blog, in which anyone, including already-established opinion writers, could write at any length and in any tone, unedited, and in which people could fire back with comments and expected to. Pretty soon, everything was "interactive," explosive conversations apparently breaking out all over.
In comparison to the blogosphere, the op-ed page of the Post or the Times appeared to be sluggish, limited, the possibilities for interaction and feedback minimal or desultory. By 2010, the Times and Post and others were sponsoring blogs linked from their pages and presenting columns as though they were blogs, emulating the loose and unfiltered tone of the era's online conversations.
The same thing has happened in spades over the last decade with podcasts and newsletters; now the typical Times op-ed column from Ezra Klein might be a digested podcast episode, and the page publishes columns that are apparently newsletters of uncertain length and multiple subject-matters, rather than neatly-turned essays.
All of this is moving me eventually (I'm well past the 750-word limit now) to what has happened at the Post. Jeff Bezos specifies that the Post opinion page will now advocate two general positions: "personal liberties and free markets." These are the positions, I note, of the Koch brothers and Reason magazine: libertarianism, in short. If I had to speculate on the reasons for this dramatic change, I'd say that Bezos has resolved to be less offensive to Donald Trump.
And the Post's opinion operation has been characterized by extremely repetitive anti-Trump ranters such as Jennifer Rubin, Philip Bump, and Dana Milbank. Bezos, one might say, is trying to stave off the repression to come, and also to preserve Amazon's government contracts, especially for cloud computing. However, as Milbank points out right there on the page, Elon Musk might sound like a libertarian at times, but Trump is definitely not one, and doesn’t consistently advocate personal liberties or free markets. Rather, he advocates state capitalism and racial nationalism, which are no more libertarian than the Post's previous dispensation. If the goal is to placate Trump, "personal liberties and free markets" might not be enough in the long run.
A few days in, there have been no visible changes on the page, though editor David Shipley has resigned. But there soon will be. The Post's page will cease to try to be the scene of the sort of open and general debate that fueled my family's kitchen table. You'll know what opinions you'll be exposed to before you pick it up; it'll be hard to get provoked. Some pretty good writers might get axed. Is humorist Alexandra Petri into free markets? (Could Art Buchwald appear now in the Post?) How does the sharpish Catherine Rampell stack up? These are some of the best opinion writers working now.
If I were rejiggering someone's opinion page, I might go in the opposite direction. I’d want extremely lively, extremely quick, extremely written essays taking up all sorts of views on all sorts of issues. I might hire writers and fire political consultants. I might give a communist and a fascist 750 words each to go at each other, and then let Will sort it out for us all. I might go back to trying to craft sonnets.
I hasten to add that George Will should be good to go under the new dispensation, Bezos' or mine. There might be another 50 years of personal liberties and free markets in that big cranium.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell