Don't Take Me To Your Leader: The Pulitzer And The Lost Art Of Editorials

Are Editorials Dead?

If you can find one, look at the editorials in the typical metro paper. What you'll read, most of the time, is material that would have to improve to be pablum. Editorial writers have trained themselves and each other to write in a style that is more effective at relieving a reader's insomnia than any drug, and which offers no straightforward opinion -- and that used to be the whole point of editorials before newspapers became part of corporate empires. It's especially snicker-worthy when an editorial pronounces that the president, or Congress, or state legislature, "must" do this or that -- as if an increasingly feeble institution could order up such things.

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