Political Journalism: Rarely Scratching the Surface of Life

“But the columns that stick with us most of all rarely touch on the polls or the name-calling. Instead, they might be retired Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Bill Lyon’s ‘viewpoints’ columns, which chronicle the dissolution of his memory as he suffers from Alzheimer’s.”

I think I know now what Charles Krauthammer meant in the introduction to his book. His anthology Things That Matter was published in 2013 and would rise to the top of The New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers List shortly thereafter. It was a retrospective, a collection of the author’s favorite columns he’d written over his decades-long career as a political commentator.

But, in the introduction, he says something rather unexpected, given the profession for which he is known: making clear his opinions on politics, elections, Washington. He writes that he had originally planned to feature only his columns, which did not touch on politics—only those about his late brother, or a favorite professor from Harvard Medical School, or being a fan of the (then) habitually disappointing Washington Nationals.

But he changed his mind: “…in the end I couldn’t. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.” Fair point, but one wonders if he might have been onto something with his initial idea.