In the autumn of 2021, I began noticing threads like this from Mark Jacob, a former editor at the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times. It’s not uncommon for journalists to become more critical of their occupation once they retire, but Jacob’s observations cut deeper than most. (“Yes, media should be fair – to the readers, to the facts. But not to the 2-party system. To our democracy.”) So I asked if he would do an interview with me about his own “pressthink,” and how it developed an edge. He graciously agreed. Here is our exchange.
WSJ Op-Ed: Religion Is Dying? Don’t Believe It
An interview with John Pilger: “Assange is the courageous embodiment of a struggle against the most oppressive forces in our world”
In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, renowned Australian investigative journalist John Pilger has warned that the “US is close to getting its hands on” the courageous WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Korean Doomsday Sect Gets Rich in Fiji With Government Help
Grace Road Church believes a nuclear-tinged Judgment Day is rapidly approaching — and that Fiji is the post-apocalyptic promised land from which they’ll feed humanity. But despite repeated accusations of abuses, including ritual beatings and forcing members to perform unpaid labor, they’ve received a warm welcome from the Fijian government.
‘I was wrong’
If you’re an opinion writer for one of the biggest news organizations in the world, you’re going to have some strong takes. And, occasionally, you’re going to be wrong.
Rarely do you see an opinion writer or columnist write pieces where they admit they were wrong.
But that’s exactly what eight opinion writers at The New York Times have done in “New York Times Columnists on What They Got Wrong.”
The latest columns were:
- Paul Krugman with “I Was Wrong About Inflation.”
- Michelle Goldberg with “I Was Wrong About Al Franken.”
- David Brooks with “I Was Wrong About Capitalism.”
- Zeynep Tufekci with “I Was Wrong About Why Protests Work.”
- Bret Stephens with “I Was Wrong About Trump Voters.”
- Thomas L. Friedman with “I Was Wrong About Chinese Censorship.”
- Farhad Manjoo with “I Was Wrong About Facebook.”
- Gail Collins with “I Was Wrong About Mitt Romney (and His Dog).”
In the introduction to the piece, the Times writes, “In our age of hyperpartisanship and polarization, when social media echo chambers incentivize digging in and doubling down, it’s not easy to admit you got something wrong. But here at Times Opinion, we still hold on to the idea that good-faith intellectual debate is possible, that we should all be able to rethink our positions on issues, from the most serious to the most trivial. It’s not necessarily easy for Times Opinion columnists to engage in public self-reproach, but we hope that in doing so, they can be models of how valuable it can be to admit when you get things wrong.”
I cannot express how much I like this idea for all the reasons the Times explained.
But, just for fun, you might go to Twitter and see the reaction to Stephens’ column regarding Trump voters.
'Some Impending Social Disaster'
I must have learned of the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland from a book, certainly not in school. It might have been from Yeats: “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.” More likely it was from Frank O’Connor in his first memoir, An Only Child (1961):
“In April 1916 a handful of Irishmen took over the city of Dublin and were finally surrounded and overwhelmed by British troops with artillery. The daily paper showed Dublin as they showed Belgian cities destroyed by the Germans, as smoking ruins inhabited by men with rifles and machine guns. At first my only reaction was horror that Irishmen could commit such a crime against England.”
Seditious talk in some quarters. O’Connor (1903-1966) was born Michael O’Donovan. He came from Cork, the home of my mother’s forebears, the Hayeses and McBrides. His was a Dickensian childhood of poverty and his father’s alcoholism. I had an early interest in Irish writers, and O’Connor was among the first I read. His prose was clean and pre-Modernist. He was a storyteller. More than fifty of his short stories were published in The New Yorker between 1945 and 1965. His editor at the magazine was William Maxwell.
While rereading O’Connor’s memoir I was reminded of Dr. Johnson, Louis Armstrong and others who start life with crippling disadvantages – poverty, disease, prejudice, limited formal education -- conditions that crush many. Through some combination of pluck, luck, perseverance and a congenital gift, they survive, prosper and return a disproportionately generous gift to the world. Here is O’Connor, addressing anyone with an autodidactic streak who has had the good fortune to encounter an encouraging teacher or mentor:
“The first book I took from [his teacher, Daniel] Corkery’s bookcase was a Browning. It was characteristic of my topsy-turvy self-education that I knew by heart thousands of lines in German and Irish, without really knowing either language, but had never heard of Browning, or indeed of any other English poet but Shakespeare, whom I didn’t think much of. But my trouble with poetry was that of most auto-didacts. I could not afford books, so I copied and memorized like mad. It is a theory among scholars that all the great periods of manuscript activity coincide with some impending social disaster and that scribes are like poor Jews in the midst of a hostile community, gathering up their few little treasures in the most portable form before the next pogrom.”
