Columnists take on the world not reality

As the news-reporting function of newspapers has come under threat from online and broadcast media and revenue models have been called into question by the advent of freesheets, many people have argued that the role of the press will increasingly be to provide analysis of the complex myriad of events in the world, rather than simply reporting on them.  In a world where news is increasingly a commodity that is given away, a focus on analysis allows the newspapers to “move up the value chain” – to use the currently fashionable buzzwords, with the strategic goal of becoming “an essential aid in decoding a world of bewildering change,” to quote Tony O'Reilly.  However, the success of this repositioning depends on the ability of columnists to understand and analyse the world.  Doing this properly is hard – it requires a willingness to view the world with an open mind, to actually try to understand what the motive forces behind world events are and a devotion to accurate and detailed research.  It's much easier and cheaper to simply repeat ones' prejudices over and over and allow the real world to merely serve as a source of occasional anecdotes with which to back up one's prejudices – or totally ignored when inconvenient.

Hence our newspapers are filled to the brim with columnists who seem to believe that no matter how ill-informed, deluded, or downright stupid their opinions might be, they do not need to be adorned with research or the slightest comparison with external, objective reality before being paraded in public.

Analysis this is not.

This criticism does not just apply to the sycophants and bottom-feeders who populate Tony O'Reilly's Sunday Independent. John Waters' career as an Irish Times columnist has, for at least the last decade, been a lengthy study in the art of getting paid for repeating a small set of uninformed opinions that are only the most casual acquaintances with the four dimensional reality of this universe. He lives in a strange world dominated by feminists and hordes of leftists and liberals, all apparently residing in a place called “D4”, a location that is both symbolic and imaginary (unless it really refers to a coordinate on a map of the outer fringes of the known universe populated by a bizarre alien species).  The headlines that adorn his pieces: “better look out Bob! It's feminazis”; “brutal rule of social workers”; “liberalism, not racism poses the real danger”; “Prejudice is right on if men are the victims” provide a good idea of the sort of place that it is: a world dominated by “cultural liberalism, the most fanatical religion ever seen, as intolerant as fundamentalist Islam.” Unless the women's studies departments of the world's universities are secretly organising mass stonings of believers and imprisoning women for dressing too conservatively, without anybody else noticing,  Waters is clearly not dealing with the actually existing world.

It is a trivial task to demonstrate the Waters's world is completely unlike the real world that most of us inhabit.  In November 2004, writing about the way in which the media represent the family, he wrote that “roughly half the children growing up now will experience negligible fathering in their formative years. That is the crisis. There is no other” – an opinion that anybody who inhabits our world full of wars, genocides and all manner of suffering and cruelty must immediately recognise as referring to some alternative reality.  Even if we were to charitably assume that he was referring only to matters within the family, his sweeping generalisation still entirely ignores the shockingly widespread child abuse that studies such as the SAVI report have revealed. Yet, although such a statement may be particularly glaringly stupid, it's not particularly out of character – he is a writer who is accustomed to getting carried away.  It's perhaps more surprising that he has been afforded regular space for the last decade in what would see itself as Ireland's most reputable newspaper to propound such deluded opinions.

The apparent total lack of even the most basic standards in argumentative methods or evidence, even in ‘respectable' opinion columns also appears to have a negative psychological impact on columnists over time.  Several of them appear to lose the ability to distinguish between external reality and their writings, even going so far as to imagine their opinions are somehow representative of the entire country, that they actually speak as the moral voice of the people, connected by some psychic sixth sense to what the “silent majority” really thinks.  Once again John Waters is among the worst offenders when it comes to speaking on behalf of all 5 million of us. He often even  lapses into speaking in the first person plural to tell us about our various psychological ailments: how “we have jettisoned the time-tested framework of sense”, “we have become fixated on finding scapegoats” and “we are continually flagellating ourselves,” a rhetorical device which never fails to produce a desire to slap the author and shout, as loudly as possible, “speak for yourself” (well at least it does in this reader's case).