Chesterton Again - and The Washington Post

Now that I have one of those silly little tracker things I am fast concluding that, besides my dearest friends and family, the only people reading my blog are probably actually looking for "9 Lessons and Carols".

So this one is for my dearest friends and family. Although its too long for a Googler in a hurry - I think its a well expressed insight:

The Brits have never bought into the American separation of reporting and opinion. They assume that an intelligent person, paid to learn about some subject, will naturally develop views about it. And they consider it more truthful to express those views than to suppress them in the name of objectivity."

This is the direction that could make more people buy the Post— because the way it is now, we know exactly what is going to be in the paper before we crack it open; that is, if we crack it open. Kinsley's observation reminds me of Robert Blatchford and the great Christian writer G.K. Chesterton. Blatchford was a British reformer who was active from 1890 to 1920; he had converted to socialism after witnessing the misery in the slums of Manchester, and started his own paper, the Clarion, in 1891. Yet Blatchford was not what we would consider a typical newspaper editor. After he vigorously attacked Christianity, he did something extraordinary: he invited the opposition to mount a defense in the pages of his own paper. We're not talking about the modern liberal concept of newspaper debate, which entails trashing conservatives and then allowing them a paragraph to respond two weeks later in the Letters section. This fracas was going to be detailed, allow for several responses and responses to responses, and go on for weeks. It provided the kind of intellectual fireworks that people, no matter what side they are on, will pay to see.

In 1904, a bright young journalist named G.K. Chesterton took up Blatchford's challenge. (Much of what Chesterton wrote for the occasion would wind up in the book Heretics). Blatchford even went to the incredible step of appointing a Christian, George Haw, to choose the defenders who would contribute to the Clarion. The writers wrote repeatedly and at length, and the controversy didn't merely go on for weeks—it lasted for over a year. To Blatchford—and Chesterton—religion wasn't something to be stuck on the last page of the Saturday paper. It was central to people's lives, and as such deserved to be both challenged and praised at length, in depth, and with absolute freedom.

Indeed, the kind of freedom once allocated to journalists is stunning in retrospect. I recently purchased the full run of the weekly column Chesterton wrote for The Illustrated London News for the first three decades of the 20th century. Simply reading down the list of column titles is enough to make one anxious to read the pieces themselves: "Joan of Arc and Modern Materialism," "The Ethics of Fairy-Tales," "Moral Education in a Secular World," "Truth in the Newspapers," and many, many debunkings of bolshevism when it was new.

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Imagine the Post running that today. Imagine an ongoing debate in Outlook between Robert George or Richard John Neuhaus and Nan Aaron over abortion. You might even find people opening the paper with the anticipation I felt once upon a time.

Mark Gauvreau Judge

Ex Post Facto (You should really read the whole article!)