Whose Point of View?

Some thoughts about editorial integrity at Cleveland’s barely-daily newspaper, but leading to wider implications...

There’s a political columnist with the Cleveland Plain Dealer whose work often makes me wonder where he is coming from. He is Kevin O’Brien, and his role the paper is more that that of one columnist among several. He is also assistant editor, not only editing others’ columns, but also selecting everything that appears in the PD’s Forum section. He’s one influential man in the paper’s/media group’s stable, and though his choice of material for the Forum is fair and diverse, his own writing drives me nuts.

It’s not that Kevin O’Brien is conservative. I understand and accept the rightness of a newspaper presenting opinion writers who offer a range of perspectives and viewpoints. My problem with O’Brien is that he is, to my mind, an off-the-edge-of-the-cliff conservative who is so far right that he rarely lets facts get in the way of his rants.  He makes Charles Krathammer sound middle-of-the-road and George Will sound smart (which he probably is). He is Rush Limbaugh on printer’s ink, a male Maureen Dowd.

O’Brien has so upset me that I have written to the Plain Dealer twice to suggest that he be fired, despite the fact I am usually tolerant of diverse viewpoints and always defend the need to present them. But that is how much he irks me. I’ve been told he is really a nice guy, but I do not doubt for a moment that he would banish me and my liberal kind from the face of the earth if he could.

So, when Ted Diadiun, who is sort of the Plain Dealer’s ombudsman, wrote a column headed “Columnists give off sparks that illuminate multiple points of view” for the October 13 PD, I read it with great interest, wondering what he would tell us about my old nemesis. Diadiun began by explaining that “a columnist’s work [does not go] into the paper unedited. But the editor is there mainly to be sure that the column makes sense, is grammatical and won’t get the paper into legal difficulty.” He quotes Chris Quinn, vice president for content of the Northeast Ohio Media Group, as saying that “as long as the column is factual, and well-reasoned and fair, it goes in. But it does have to be those three things.”

Even though I believe Kevin O’Brien’s work often falls short of those standards, I have no energy for doing the work necessary to prove it again. Why bother? I have tried before and he is still there at the Plain Dealer, spewing out words that sometimes make no sense and often fall far short of being “factual, and well-reasoned and fair.”

But as I read further I witnessed O’Brien doing himself in. 

Diadiun reports that O’Brien said "he doesn’t write his columns necessarily to persuade,” and then quotes the man himself:

“I don’t write for people who disagree with me. If they read it and think about what I say, great. But as a conservative in Northeast Ohio, I’m writing for the minority who think the way I do, and who deserve to have someone in the media taking their side, and giving them some affirmation.”

So: when I read Kevin O’Brien’s words I read not his own thoughts but rather his take on the group-think of a minority (funny: conservatives often claim they speak for a majority). He sees himself as representing conservatives, and as responsible for affirming them. He submits his individual independence as a columnist to those who hold points of view broadly like his in order to take their side and urge them on, no matter how wrong or irrational they may be. Perhaps he is uninterested in persuading others to see things as he sees them because he doesn’t know how he sees things apart from the views of those he represents. Being “factual, and well-reasoned and fair” is not required unless the right-wingers for whom he is a shill should someday become that way.

But now O’Brien is no longer a shill for conservatives, because he’s outed himself. He has revealed his own secret. We don’t have to read him anymore. We just have to attend to the rantings and ravings of the Tea Party and we are inside Kevin O’Brien’s head.

How many other columnists and opinion shapers see themselves in the service of particular constituencies or groups? Conversely, how many think and write out of their own hearts and convictions, conscious of their particular point of view, but unwilling to bend everything they offer to that point of view, especially when facts take them to another place? I’d like to read columns that tell me why a thing is so, even when I wish that thing were not so, so I might learn something new and, if possible, speak and act upon it myself. I would even like such informed and independent thinking from the pens and keyboards of “liberal” writers and commentators.

So again I ask, why does the Plain Dealer need Kevin O’Brien? Why do they pay him to say things straight out of the scripts of a particularly partisan minority group? Let the right-wing pay him, so that the Plain Dealer can hire a conservative columnist and editor capable of thinking and writing for him or herself, willing even to try to persuade me. I can subscribe to that.