Best-selling writer discusses journalism

By: Joy Pavelski

Posted: 3/13/08

Writer and commentator Mark Steyn's most recent book, "America Alone" has risen to the top of best-selling book lists including Amazon.com and the New York Times. His weekly columns can be read everywhere, from Florida to Israel to New Zealand.

The Canadian sat down during his campus visit this week to answer, in his mix of British Commonwealth accents, a few questions over coffee.

He will speak tonight at 7 p.m. in Phillips Auditorium. The speech, entitled "Lights Out on Liberty," will discuss the dimming of Western freedom, particularly free speech limits binding Steyn and others across the globe.

Collegian: You are an opinion writer. Let's talk about the current culture of insta-punditry. Do you consciously counter "sound byte" reporting and commentary?

Mark Steyn: If you're in the opinion business, you should only be in it if you have something distinctive to say. There are times you should not have an opinion. When the tsunami hit a few years ago, I did not write a column on it. No one is pro-tsunami. You can have an opinion on the politics surrounding the tsunami, but not on the meteorological events. The trick is to connect the story of the day to long-term trends. The knack of running a good newspaper is to have the story on the page when people want to read about it.

C: Your writing has a strong smart aleck side. Is that an inborn character trait, or did life teach it to you?

MS: I don't know why you'd want to be a columnist if you did not appreciate the humor in life. That doesn't mean being hyper-partisan. You also want to see the comedy in your own side. I don't like indignation - I don't think it's useful. It's important to be funny about serious things. The funny writers should be funny about war, famine, pestilence and disease, because it's an important weapon in discussing those subjects. Someone asked the Ayotollah Khomeini about Islam's attitude toward jokes, and he said, 'There are no jokes in Islam.' We should use jokes to our advantage. Find the comedy in a situation, because that is a good way to change people's minds on it.

C: Do you really think books and opinion columns change anyone's mind?

MS: You wouldn't do it if it were a waste of time. I've written theater and film criticism, and if you criticize a play on opening night, the director may actually change the production. It's not the same with movies, but with political stuff, you're closer to the stage model. You can actually change things. Blogs and their kind are the under-news. It starts on the Internet, then a few columnists and reporters pick it up, it attracts attention, then it's on the evening news.

C: How did you become paid to opine?

MS: Covering the [President Bill Clinton] impeachment trial, you notice in the press box that the American columnists tend to be older than me. It's different in a lot of Commonwealth countries because they have more competition in the papers. The columnist is the voice of the paper.

That's one of the big differences between American and international journalism. Everyone talks about the decline of the newspaper as if it's inevitable, but the total newspaper readership in London is nearly the same between 1996 and 2006. The Los Angeles Times and New York Times would love to have those numbers. It's the difference in the media environment, the monopoly. If you're a Gannet monopoly paper, you can't afford to be controversial. The Guardian in London can afford to be left wing, and the Telegraph can be conservative because they're got competition [...]

No one is going to read a newspaper simply because it's a worthy thing to do. You've got to compete for people's attention.

Hillsdale College Collegian 2008