OPINION

OPINION | PAUL FARHI: Outrage generator

Joseph Epstein says he has a lot of hate mail, but no regrets.

A few weeks ago, the veteran writer and former university lecturer dashed off a few hundred words for The Wall Street Journal, to which he regularly contributes guest columns. He intended to make a point about advanced degrees and the pretentiousness of titles.

Epstein focused on first lady Jill Biden, who holds a doctorate in education, urging her not to use the honorific “Dr.” The sub-headline on his piece said it was a “fraudulent, even comic” title.

Epstein’s op-ed became one of the most talked about and most loathed articles of the year. People took to social media to denounce it and him as misogynistic, condescending and contemptible. At last count, Epstein said he’d gotten 200 pieces of hate mail, many from women and many using sexist, homophobic or anti-Semitic slurs. Some urged him to die.

“My reaction is one of great sadness,” he told The Washington Post, sounding more rueful than rebuked. “I’m not sorry I wrote it at all. I’m just mildly depressed about how stupid [the reaction] was. What struck me is how people are so content to put labels on you—‘you’re sexist,’ ‘you’re racist.’ Well, labels aren’t thoughts.”

The reaction to Epstein’s essay says much about his message, but it also says a few things about the form it came in. The uproar was another indication that op-eds—guest columns published on the page opposite a newspaper’s own editorials (hence “op-ed”) still retain their power to provoke and outrage 50 years after The New York Times introduced a daily page devoted to them.

In fact, in an age in which opinion is abundant—check your Twitter or Facebook feed—some of the most controversial articles of recent vintage have been newspaper op-eds.

Op-eds in the Times and Journal this summer, for example, nearly ignited a civil war inside the two venerable news organizations.

After the Journal’s famously conservative Opinion section published an op-ed by Vice President Mike Pence in June about the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic (“We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy,” he wrote, despite evidence to the contrary), the Journal’s news reporters and editors seemed to have had enough.

In a letter to the paper’s publisher, nearly 300 newsroom staffers criticized “Opinion’s lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence,” citing Pence’s op-ed among others.

The editorial board fired back by publishing a defiant statement that carried the sub-headline, “These pages won’t wilt under cancel-culture pressure.”

The Journal’s editorial page editor Paul Gigot remained similarly unmoved by the blowback from Epstein’s op-ed. In his Journal column he called the reaction “overwrought,” and added, “These pages aren’t going to stop publishing provocative essays merely because they offend the new administration or the political censors in the media and academe.” (Gigot didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article).

An op-ed sparked a similar conflagration at the Times in June. Reporters and editors took to social media to protest the publication of a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that recommended using the military to respond to civil unrest. Readers also sounded off, resulting in the resignation of the paper’s editorial page editor James Bennet and the reassignment of his deputy James Dao.

Bennet and Dao were the editors principally responsible for ushering into publication one of the most-discussed articles of the entire Trump era, an op-ed by a “senior administration official” who described himself as part of the “resistance” to President Donald Trump inside the White House.

The column, credited to Anonymous, prompted a brief but unsuccessful hunt within the White House for the writer’s identity and a series of rage-tweets from Trump. One read simply, “TREASON?”

The modern op-ed page was created in 1970 by a New York Times editor, John B. Oakes, with the express purpose of expanding the range of opinion found on the newspaper’s pages (at the Times it also became home to premium-priced quarter-page ads). Within a few years, most daily newspapers had copied the idea, regularly reserving space for columns by politicians, religious leaders, experts of various kinds and ordinary people with an interesting point of view.

Although most columns pass without much comment, the few that become part of the national conversation do so as a result of a combination of factors. The identity of the writer matters, as does his or her argument.

And the medium seems to be as important as the message. Only a small handful of elite “legacy” publications—principally The Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post—appear to have platforms big enough to create wide attention.

The three newspapers still enjoy an advantage even a large regional paper or social media platform does not: They are read by business and political elites, which makes them the first choice when a business or political elite wants to unburden himself or herself on an issue.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), for example, caused a commotion—millions of page views, thousands of reader comments, cable news discussion—with an op-ed in The Post last year critiquing President Trump (headline: “Trump’s character falls short”).

A similar hubbub followed The Post’s publication of special counsel Robert Mueller III’s commentary about Trump’s pardon of campaign adviser Roger Stone (headline: “Roger Stone remains a convicted felon, and rightly so”).

Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security official who outed himself as Anonymous in October, said he never considered publishing his anti-Trump essay anywhere but The New York Times. In an interview, Taylor said he wrote the oped with The Times in mind “because it is the paper of record, and there is no publication Donald Trump despises more than The New York Times.”

He added, “It was important to me to publish it in an outlet that had become a symbol for the president’s attacks on the free press. His derision of The New York Times as ‘fake news’ and the ‘enemy of the people’ made it a natural place to offer up the truth about presidential misconduct.”

Taylor said he continues to be harassed and threatened by Trump’s supporters for his op-ed and a subsequent best-selling book on the same topic, also written anonymously. He is scorned as a hypocrite on both sides for having stayed in the Trump administration.

Much like Epstein, he laments the culture that he feels this reaction represents: “We should be debating each other’s ideas, not destroying each other’s lives,” he says.

The outrage generated by op-eds may be greater now, but it’s debatable whether the range of published opinion is any more daring than when Oakes unveiled his innovation 50 years ago, said media historian Michael Socolow of the University of Maine.

Socolow cites several Times op-eds from the 1970s that would likely prompt an angry reaction, but passed without major controversy at the time. One was a 1971 piece composed of reconstructed quotes from the late Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who urged people to die in the “international proletarian revolutionary struggle,” effectively an argument for overthrowing the U.S. government.

Another in 1978 defended the regime of Cambodian communist leader Pol Pot and labeled the Times’ own reporting about genocide in the southeast Asian country “a lie,” “ludicrous” and a “myth.” It was written by the editor of a Marxist-Leninist newspaper.

“The acceptable boundaries of discourse have changed” at The Times, Socolow says; they have become narrower. (Times acting editorial page editor Kathleen Kingsbury did not respond to a request for comment).

Nevertheless, op-eds may be an enduring form not just because they are relatively popular with readers but because they are also cost-effective. Reporting is expensive, requiring an investment in professional reporters and editors; opinions are cheap. Most publications pay nominal sums, or nothing at all, for guest submissions.

This insight enabled a group led by Internet entrepreneurs Arianna Huffington and Andrew Breitbart to create Huffington Post (now HuffPost), a popular site that was sustained in its formative years by “guest” essays and other inexpensive “user-generated content.”

Major news sites have also benefited from this. The Times’ Opinion section produced fewer than 10 percent of all the content on The Times site, yet opinion pieces accounted for 20 percent of the stories read by Times subscribers as of late 2017, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. (More recent figures were unavailable; a Times representative didn’t respond to a request for information.)

Local and regional newspapers, however, have to work harder to keep the “takes” coming, said Sewell Chan, the editor of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial page. The major national papers, he says, are flooded “with fairly polished submissions.” Even at a large news organization like the L.A. Times, said Chan, “a lot of work goes into soliciting op-eds, especially from local scholars and writers, and the editing time is substantial as well.”

What may have changed most about op-eds over the past half-century isn’t the form itself but the audience for it, he said. A half-century ago, “the middle class was stronger,” and the political parties “weren’t as far apart as they are now. Society, generally, was less unequal and less polarized than now.”

His newspaper, he said, is among a small group of regional legacy newspapers, such as the Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer, that are locally owned and still investing in original journalism, including lively opinion pages.

“I hope regional and local papers survive the information apocalypse we’re going through,” Chan said. “We know that local news sources are still among the most trusted for Americans, and that trust urgently needs rebuilding.

“Op-eds by local professors, writers, leaders and influencers are important, and we need to preserve the forums that publish them.”

Upcoming Events